KP: I met David Keogh, a dentist, who urged me to come to Dumbarton Oaks as a volunteer. I was interviewed by Chris Blazina and it was an awesome place. This was around, let me think, I would say it was around 2001. And I was there for quite a while, and I’m still there and I love the place. I remembered the feeling of awe. That experience was like a rapture walking into that Music Room. I mean there’s so much history hitting you in the face, and I saw the virginal, and I saw the harpsichord, and I knew that Kirkpatrick had played there and Wanda Landowska, who was at that time world famous as a harpsichordist. I personally didn’t care for her playing – emboldened to say because it was so brittle. But Kirkpatrick was fabulous and I went to several concerts there. For me, the most overwhelming experience musically was when this person came into the hall for rehearsal with us. I was in a little chamber orchestra. We were all members of the National Symphony and Paul Callaway of the Washington Cathedral was going to conduct us. If I recall correctly, this singer, a soprano, was going to sing excerpts from The Magic Flute of Mozart. Now who can dislike Mozart? Anyway, this woman came into the room and standing next to the conductor said, “I want to apologize right off the bat for my voice. I’ve just come from Australia and my throat is dry and I’m sure I’m not going to be able to sing very well, but I ask for your patience with me.” And she started to sing, and it was breathtaking. I found tears coming down my face. It was just overwhelming. It was so beautiful. Mozart of course, for me, is exquisite and this voice building it was so marvelous. I had played the Magic Flute several times with the Washington Opera Company. And so I was so smitten with it all, and I had some wonderful things to play on the bassoon. And it was just a thrilling experience. Who else?

AS: Of course, that turned out to be Joan Sutherland.

KP: Yeah, I think that’s her name. She was extraordinary.

AS: What year was that?

KP: I’m not good at that. But I would guess its – why do you not have those programs available?

AS: I think they’re in the Archives, although I couldn’t – I work for the archivist, but I’m not intimately familiar with the Archives myself. I think that what we’re trying to go back and collect now are impressions and what it was like to be there that weren’t necessarily recorded on the program.

KP: I see. Well, you know, people ask me over the years, as they have other musicians, “Why do you need a conductor? I see you just looking at the music.” And I said, when you drive a car, do you not see what’s on the side? On the right, on the left, what’s going on in back and what’s going on in front? You see it all. You can’t be a musician without peripheral vision. And so they get an idea of what I’m talking about. Anyway, I would be turning and be seeing these treasures in the Music Room. I’d come home just thrilled, and my wife would say, “Gee, you look like you could light up a room you’re so excited.” I’d tell her about –

AS: Did you play concerts after you were a docent or these were earlier?

KP: This was before. I became a docent around, let’s see, this is 2009 – maybe 2002 or 2003. And I’m talking now about the mid-1960s, I think.

AS: Was this still when Mrs. Bliss was alive? Do you ever remember interacting with her?

KP: I think she was still alive.

AS: Because I know she was a great patron of the concerts.

KP: Yes she was. She hired Nadia Boulanger, who was the foremost pedagogic person to conduct, and it was only because – let me start over. Mrs. Bliss asked Igor Stravinsky to write a work to celebrate their anniversary – their 50th. And he decided to do that, and when it was finished she asked him to come over and conduct it. He was ill, so Nadia Boulanger conducted it. It was a symphony in E♭. I love Stravinsky. He was – there was a lot of devil in him. And he wrote the kind of piece – just joyful and wonderful and disjointed, as music often is. He went through phases. He was like a tailor. He would go through different styles. I loved the woodwind quartet. I loved the L'Histoire du soldat, which is very worth hearing. So many good things. But anyway, Leontyne Price sang there with us. Jennie Tourel, who might be known to you. She was famous, in any case. Ralph Kirkpatrick, yes, he was just a wonderful harpsichordist. And Alexander Schneider, who played violin in the Budapest String Quartet.

AS: These were all around the mid-1960s?

KP: Yes. Howard Mitchell who started out as the solo cellist in the National Symphony when it was a very young orchestra, and then became finally its conductor – that was after Kindler – Hans Kindler. And Mitchell was not a great conductor, but almost adequate. I wouldn’t talk like this, except he’s gone.

AS: He conducted at Dumbarton Oaks?

KP: Mitchell? Yeah. He also – just a little bit–but he also played a Hindemith cello concerto, which is a very fine work. He really stumbled over that. Paul Callaway was the conductor. And Paul Callaway was the chief musician at the Washington Cathedral – the National Cathedral. What else can I tell you?

AS: I wonder if you, having attended these concerts in the mid-1960s – that was a very different era, I think, of Dumbarton Oaks, than I’ve seen now. From what I understand, there were very much society events.

KP: It was indeed. I had to listen to rehearsals, in those days – yeah, it was very hoity-toity. Hoity-toity.

AS: So, you would be playing for the who’s who of Georgetown and of Washington, DC.

KP: I suspect. Exactly

AS: I don’t know if there are any particular – if you had any interaction with them –

KP: Well, there are people on the National Symphony Board who were very well heeled or they wouldn’t have been on that board who came to those concerts. I was a fairly prominent member of that orchestra and – I mean when you walk on stage with something as big as a bassoon, and there’s one right behind you that I turned into a floor lamp.

AS: That’s neat.

KP: Isn’t it nice?

AS: It must make you stand out, I guess.

KP: Yeah. In any case, I got to know some of these people. We were friendly. We had kind of a relationship over the years. And among them, there were some people that became very good friends.

AS: And they were all patrons of the Dumbarton Oaks concerts?

KP: Not all, but some.

AS: Speaking of the National Symphony Orchestra, you are, I think, the perfect person to ask about the relationship between Dumbarton Oaks and the National Symphony. It sounds like you came to know of Dumbarton Oaks through the National Symphony. Is that fair?

KP: I think that’s a reasonable assumption – playing those concerts. I spoke in hushed tones in that place and, yeah, I was amazed by it all.

AS: You said that the same people who were National Symphony musicians knew people at Dumbarton Oaks, or was there a formal relationship there?

KP: No. It was very casual and very singular.

AS: Did Dumbarton Oaks have a place in the Washington, D.C. music community that you know?

KP: No.

AS: It’s an isolated place.

KP: Yeah. The attitude now has changed markedly. They want people to come in, which is a big change. My feeling when I came into the place to be a volunteer was, don’t come and see us – we’ll let a few people come through – let me see your nails and hair; you need a shave. I make fun, but it had that feeling.

AS: This was in the 1960s too?

KP: Yeah

AS: And do you remember a moment when that changed? A decade when that began to be different? Or was it not really until you came back to be a docent?

KP: I think it was more when I came back. The head of the docents had a lot to say about the attitude of the docents, how they felt about it. And Chris Blazina, who’s been with the docent program with some time – very hard-working, dedicated person. And it’s become very professional, even though it’s voluntary. And she has a wonderful grasp of how to deal with kids and how to keep them interested and how to arouse their curiosity, and so on. And she’s very good that way – and how to talk to adults about these things and ask them questions so that it heightens their curiosity about what they’re looking at. And that’s fun.

AS: Shall we talk a little bit about the docent program and your experiences of that? I wonder what you recall about the docent training process. You talked about your hiring a little bit, but the training experience?

KP: The training was very demanding. I think we met a couple times a week, maybe two or three times a week. And we had lectures with the heads of departments. They were learned in their field. The pre-Columbian people knew what they were talking about. They could discuss a piece and its history and its aesthetics and all that. It was very exciting. I was – in 1959 the National Symphony took a tour of all of Latin America starting in Mexico and going down the west coast into Panama, and then going through – let me think – what’s next going south? Chile and we went to Peru and Argentina and we came out through Paraguay and Uruguay and then Brazil. It was fascinating and fabulous: three months – a tour of three months. I remember Fanny and I – my wife and I – discussing the ramifications of that three months away from my children and her. And I said, well Fanny, I’m going to buy us a house. We had a two-bedroom house and it was inadequate. And she bought us this house. And this is 1969.

AS: That was your first interaction with pre-Columbian –

KS: Yeah I went to fincas where I could dig and find pieces–I found a pipa–a little pipe. It was pre-Columbian. And other shards, pieces of pottery. And I went to all the museums. There was a gold museum – museo de oro – a gold museum and – there was a floor made of skulls, believe it or not. A lot of gold. It was exciting, to say the least. Anyway, I had that feeling of what a thrill of seeing the pieces for the first time. So when I came back, it wasn’t long after that that those pieces at the National Gallery of Art arrived–In the basement, neglected. And that’s what had Mr. Bliss order a museum wing just to take care of his collection.

AS: This is the exhibition at the National Gallery?

KP: No, it was at the National Gallery – a lot of wonderful pieces that Bliss owned but had no place to show. This was before the wing that now holds them.

AS: Right, the Johnson –

KP: Yeah, and that is so gorgeous – inside, outside, all that glass. Gorgeous. Anyway – what?

AS: Well, back to your experience as a docent. I get the feeling that there are a lot of interesting individuals and groups that come through Dumbarton Oaks. I wonder if there are any particularly memorable groups that you led on tours.

KP: Some of the groups were strictly garden people, and they wanted to know everything about the gardens and they were gardeners on a high level. And I didn’t do any gardening work while I was playing Beethoven and Mozart, so I – and I felt at a loss, but I tried.

AS: There’s a lot of garden clubs and things like that that come through.

KP: Oh yes. And people who love roses. I remember one group that I took through – and this is true what I tell you. It’s true. I said, “Do you see this Ingrid Bergman rose?” That’s what it’s called. An Ingrid Bergman rose. And I said, “You know, when the National Symphony moved to its present site in the Kennedy Center – we were before that at Constitution Hall, which was a horrible place for music. It was just awful. And here we were in a new hall. And Antal Doráti was the conductor at the time had a press conference. And he spoke to a few members of the orchestra – I was pleased to be one of them – and to people from various cultural entities. And it was very gala and festive. And they had shrimp trays and lobster trays and any kind of drink you could think of. And I took advantage of all that largesse and I got a little tipsy. The room – the building, rather, was new to me at that time. My wife and I felt it was time to leave. We didn’t want to overstay, and since the building was new to me, I wasn’t sure where I could find an elevator to go to the parking garage. Finally, we found one. And the door opened on the elevator and I look at this woman–a beautiful woman, and I say to her, “Are you Ingrid Bergman?” And her head goes down and she says, “Yes.” And I said, Ms. Bergman, may I kiss you? And she said, reluctantly, “Yes.” And I kissed her on both cheeks and that was that.”

AS: It was a lucky time to leave.

KP: So, that’s my story of the Ingrid Bergman rose. But anyway, what can I say?

AS: So, you also did a lot of school groups coming through.

KP: Oh yes. With the children, some are very interested and some are not. It’s so important not to be a naysayer, but to encourage curiosity. “What do you think this is?” “What do you do with that?” “What would you do if you had it?” It was a lot of fun.

AS: These are local area schools?

KP: Yes. Some from out of town. Hagerstown, Benson, Baltimore.

AS: I wonder – oh yes. You were involved with the docent program for about five years?

KP: About five or six years.

AS: In that time did you notice, were there any major initiatives or changes to the program?

KP: There have been changes in emphasis, I would say, and changes for the better. I tend to speak colloquially. I don’t want to worry about trying to sound erudite and I want people to remember something. So, I made it a point not to overload visitors, but to pick out a few pieces and really let them become familiar with them. And always to say please come back. I think I was a decent person at communicating in a friendly way.

AS: By changes in emphasis, you mean changes in the style of –

KP: Yeah, it was much more formal. Now, with so much information on the wall for these pieces, we’re more reduced to saying, “If you have any questions, I would be happy to try to answer them.” Before, you could tell them the whole thing – the story about the piece. So, that’s a big change – a big change. In the Byzantine wing, it’s more possible to tell people things. It’s a wonderful collection of Byzantine artifacts. Yeah, that’s what I remember. I can’t get specific about how things – you know, how things change sometimes; it’s very gradual. I don’t say, oh listen to this; we’re going into another phase.

AS: Well, I think one thing that tends to change over the years is how – and you already touched on this – is how Dumbarton Oaks interacts and reaches out to the public – or not.

KP: Okay, I’m a volunteer, as is my wife, at the Phillips Art Gallery. We were there only a couple of times a month, and they would hand information about the other museums and art galleries in town. And if people asked where is the this or the that, we could give them a sheet of paper with that information. There was nothing about Dumbarton Oaks. And I asked Chris Blazina, “Why don’t we tell people about Dumbarton Oaks? It’s so unique.” And she said, “Well, we’re working on it.” And I think they were talking about it.

AS: And I think it’s – just now we’re getting a brochure made up – changing as we speak.

KP: Right. Exactly. But now it’s not surprising on a Sunday afternoon in nice weather to have hordes of people to come into the garden – and how deserted the galleries are.

AS: Beautiful. Did you ever attend any of the concerts in the gardens?

KP: No.

AS: Because I understand that they took place.

KP: Well, it’s obscure. And that’s why it’s so important to look in the Archives to see if there’s any information. It seated fifty people, is my understanding. And they could somehow cover the pool – either drain it or cover it – and I got the idea that they did string quartets there and they did theater. But I’m not sure. And I’ve heard different opinions.

AS: I wonder, while we’re talking about concert locations, if you might talk about the acoustics in the Music Room, because that’s an unusual setting, is it not?

KP: Yes, it is. They are not ideal. They are not terrible, C+. It’s because the surfaces are so hard and it’s not built for, really, for playing. I mean a string quartet wouldn’t be that bad, but it’s louder than it would be in a different kind of setting where there is absorbable material that can soften things. On the other hand, it’s so exotic and wonderful. I should think a string quartet would be just thrilled to play.

AS: It’s a beautiful and historical place to play – that’s certainly for sure. I meant to ask you earlier if you – you’ve had a chance to watch the concerts in that room from the sixties to really recent years.

KP: I watched and played in the sixties and seventies.

AS: Yes. And, given that span of time, have you seen a change in the type of performer and program that Dumbarton Oaks puts on?

KP: Well a lot of it is chamber music, string quartets. There’s one group, I think they are from France, and they played Baroque instruments and a copy of an early bassoon. I got tickled hearing, because it’s a good thing that it became obsolete. And I could understand it. Those instruments were built to be performed at in a small room. In the 1600s, 1700s, audiences were all invited, and they were very few. They might have fifty people at most – would be an audience. So the instruments didn’t have to be efficient in projecting sound. And so the violins played very quietly and the bassoons sounded like the tea was ready. But they played an instrument, it was a conically bored horn – I think it was an animal horn. It was called a cornetto. And it had a tiny little mouthpiece, I mean tiny. And I couldn’t - with all my experience blowing into instruments - I couldn’t understand how this man was producing all this wonderful playing. It was like a soprano trumpet. And you really had to be a knowledgeable musician to get what you wanted out of that. It was quite wonderful. The concerts, I think, all through these years have been varied in a nice way. Singers, less singers now, we haven’t had a vocal kind of concert for a long time. And we did have some famous people as I have mentioned. But now it’s mostly instrumental.

AS: Is there a tradition of these kinds of educational instrumentals? With a lot of historical instruments that you are talking about, that are rare instruments, is there a component to that?

KP: I’m not sure I understand what your question is.

AS: I guess you were talking about some rare or historical instruments –

KP: Oh you mean like the cornetto? I gave a paper to my colleagues there about those early instruments and explained the size of the concert hall and the makeup of the audience was such that instruments didn’t have to do extraordinary things to be heard. And it was when Beethoven started becoming famous and when the public was welcome because it was now a means of making wealth. They were charged for entering the concert hall, so the more the merrier. And Beethoven wanted to be, you know, recognized. In Mozart’s time, it was still small audiences. So, when Beethoven became popular, they had to change the harpsichord into a piano. The early pianoforte was kind of half way between piano and a harpsichord. And then it became a piano that had this projection that was quite magical and that was appropriate for a big a hall. I did play for over two thousand people.

AS: By comparison, Dumbarton Oaks would be a small venue.

KP: That’s why they could play those ancient instruments.

AS: I think – make sure I haven’t – I did mean to ask you – well no I think we –

KP: Let me go back to something. Strings on violins and cellos were gut strings, made of cat gut. When they had to have more volume out of them in these bigger halls, they switched to metallic, long strings and it made all the difference in the world. And that’s what they had to do. The bassoon, the oboe, the flute – they all changed. Early flutes, fancy flutes, where made of, oh my goodness, there were gold flutes and so on. The materials had to keep up with the times.

AS: Do you see a fluctuation in concerts with historical instruments? You talked about the varied nature of the concerts, singers versus historical instruments, very different things. Were they changing who attended these things? Were they members of the musical community or the public?

KP: I, you know, I have to imagine. I don’t have any first hand information, hard information, but it seems to me, when my wife and I go to a concert there, these people are well educated in general and somewhat sophisticated, concert-goers. Beyond that I can’t say. I go if it’s something that I really want to hear and not tired of having heard it over the years. And people like the concerts. They really like them.

AS: Have any of the concerts – or as a volunteer, did you interact with any of the Dumbarton Oaks Directors? Were any of them hands-on enough that –

KP: No, only the person in charge of the concerts.

AS: So, that would have been? Let’s see –

KP: Valerie.

AS: Yeah.

KP: Very nice person. I don’t know if she’s still in that position.

AS: Still involved, I know.

KP: I think she did the contact work and maybe even selected the groups, proposed them. I don’t know.

AS: Well, you’ve answered – you’ve anticipated some of my questions and answered them very completely. And, unless you have other things to add, I wonder if I may ask a sort of summary question of you. Is there anything I missed?

KP: I don’t know how to summarize what I said.

AS: Oh no, I wouldn’t have you do that. I wonder – In some ways you’ve had a unique position because the parts of Dumbarton Oaks in which you’ve been involved are unique really. I mean the Friends of Music Program and the docent program are some of the only things that Dumbarton Oaks does to really engage with the Washington community and community outside the scholarly one which resides here and is really the center of Dumbarton Oaks. Because you come to the institution from that perspective, I wonder if you have any idea how these programs have maybe changed Dumbarton Oaks or impacted the research centers there or how they could in the future?

KP: How they’ve impacted?

AS: Yes. I mean is there a communication between these types of events and the scholarly centers?

KP: I think the museum director is a very nice guy. I’d better not say any more. He’s a very nice guy and it’s a very refreshing change. I am not crazy about this introduction of putting pieces, historically different, in the mist of a collection. For instance now you can walk into the gardens and you seem something stuck in there, nothing to do with the garden at all. It’s a piece of sculpture of some sort.

AS: You are talking about the modern art installation?

KP: Yes. I don’t care for it.

AS: It’s caused quite an uproar I understand among the visitors.

KP: Yeah. I don’t understand it, and I’m not crazy about it. Beyond that, I just think the pieces there are what make it, and they are plenty good and they don’t have to be enhanced by some kind of foreign intrusion, aesthetic intrusion that doesn’t make sense. That’s my view.

AS: And others share it, that’s what we’ve heard. Well thank you for meeting with me today, I really appreciate it.

KP: Oh, it’s a pleasure. I wish I could have been more loquacious.

AS: No, no, no, you were fine.

]]>No publisherDocent ProgramDumbarton Oaks GardensPre-Columbian CollectionRobert Woods BlissMildred Barnes BlissFriends Of Music2013/06/14 16:00:00 GMT-4PageSusan Toby Evanshttp://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/susan-toby-evans
Susan Toby Evans declined an oral history interview but agreed to prepare answers to a scripted questionnaire. The following are her reminiscences which she began on February 26, 2012, based on the questionnaire. At Dumbarton Oaks, Susan Toby Evans was a Fellow (1995–1996) and a Summer Fellow (1997–1998) in the Pre-Columbian Studies Program. She was the editor and an author of the Dumbarton Oaks publication, Ancient Mexican Art at Dumbarton Oaks (2010) and the co-editor (with Joanne Pillsbury) of the Pre-Columbian Studies symposium volume, Palaces of the Ancient New World (2004).I tried to follow the questionnaire, but then as I reviewed my history with Dumbarton Oaks, I realized that Dumbarton Oaks has been almost as important in my development as a scholar as has Penn State (my PhD alma mater and long-term primary institutional affiliation) and that the relationship has been complicated. Over the years I’ve taken several different roles at Dumbarton Oaks, and these experiences opened up new opportunities – Dumbarton Oaks keeps sharing, with me and other scholars, a rich supply of ideas and information, and the bountiful harvest of advances in the field of pre-Columbian studies, for example, can immediately be seen in the D.O. publication list. Beyond that is a much wider effect of Dumbarton Oaks, the innumerable other books and papers and conferences inspired or improved by our days or months at Dumbarton Oaks. Scholars who build a relationship with Dumbarton Oaks are able to have careers rich in the pleasures of the life of the mind.

Today (February 26, 2012), I am getting ready to visit Dumbarton Oaks yet again, for a Study Day co-organized by the Pre-Columbian Studies program at D.O. and the Library of Congress, and focusing on Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, particularly as depicted in early Colonial period maps. Such maps were among my discoveries during my D.O. fellowship year (1995-1996), searching for Aztec palaces. In the old PC Rare Book room in the basement of the Main Building were wonderful high-quality facsimile editions of codices and early maps, there for the browsing.

I found the Mapa de Mexico de 1550, a view of Tenochtitlan/Mexico City full of genre figures and little buildings in native style, some houses marked with a pierced disk to signify that they were native palaces. I was well aware of this meaning of the pierced “preciousness” disk as the most valued objects in the entire Central Mexican world, but as I perused the map on that May evening, I had no idea that the real thing was locked in a safe in the next room. The two matched carved jadeite disks (PC.B.133a and b) were heavy with elegant beauty and ancient meaning. They are probably over 1,500 years old and represent related concepts of preciousness and rulership and even the count of a single day, or the perfect circle of a ripple in still water.

For me, these jade disks would hold a key to the puzzle of Teotihuacan’s history, and the importance of water worship (as shown in the Bliss Collection’s net-jaguar mural). All of these ideas would develop over the course of my editorship of the new catalogue of the Bliss Collection’s objects from Central Mexico, their first comprehensive treatment in over fifty years. I was able to show how the preciousness disk motif linked Bliss Collection objects pertaining to Teotihuacan, and I appreciate the present display of all these objects, with the disks adjacent to the great net-jaguar mural and painted ceramic vessels that repeat the motif.

All of this was far ahead of me as I began to count the Aztec palaces in the Mapa de Mexico – seeking patterns in the surviving locations of known city-state rulers. Meanwhile, I continue to explore the meaning of the preciousness disk, particularly as it expressed the sanctity of water imagery in the Teotihuacan and Aztec worlds. These matters range over my major research topics, such as “Aztecs” and also “hydrology” which merges into “monumental parks” which overlap with “palaces” (and so on). For all these ventures, Dumbarton Oaks has been a valued resource and generous patron, sowing opportunity and hoping that its scholars bring in a harvest of good work.

When I started using the Dumbarton Oaks library in 1981, my research interests were far removed from palaces and polished jades. My 1980 dissertation pertained to crop yields in the Teotihuacan Valley before European contact. In 1981, I moved to Washington to teach at Catholic University in D.C., and weekly visits to the D.O. library were an important part of life as a scholar. Over thirty years later, Dumbarton Oaks continues to be essential to me as a scholar and as a veteran member of its wide-ranging extended family.

Describing the people at Dumbarton Oaks as a “family” may seem trite to outsiders but it bears a lot of truth. From the first time I entered the Main Building I had a sense of being welcome to become a part of the life of an academic great house (including Levi-Strauss’s sense of the term). The people were convivial and relaxed and the building seemed a grand old mansion semi-converted to the needs of scholarship but strongly retaining its own identity as an elegant, lived-in home with a fascinating history. And the gardens were an education and inspiration.

In 1981, Elizabeth Boone had just begun her term as Director of Pre-Columbian Studies and I had just begun an assistant professorship in the Anthropology Department of Catholic University. The friendship Elizabeth and I developed then, when we were both new in our careers as pre-Columbianists, has been a great pleasure ever since.

In the early 1980s I was a long-distance weekly commuter between Washington and Pine Grove Mills, Pennsylvania (and my husband), and the Dumbarton Oaks community was essential to me. I learned the impressive range of the D.O. stacks and enjoyed the intellectual interchange at informal meetings, research presentations, and dinners at Elizabeth’s home. At several of these I got to know Gordon Willey, Bowditch Professor at Harvard and my own mentor’s mentor – a kind of revered academic lineage grandfather figure. My archaeological work was in the settlement pattern analysis tradition that he had pioneered and my mentor Bill Sanders had elaborated. Elizabeth used to serve Chartreuse after dinner because Gordon liked it, and I discovered that I liked it, too. Whenever I drink it, I recall Gordon and his great kindness to other scholars, particularly junior scholars. And I’m so glad he wasn’t partial to Fernet Branca or I wouldn’t have that occasion to salute his memory.

I began to attend the annual symposia, joined enthusiastically by my husband David Webster, Mayanist archaeologist and a professor of anthropology at Penn State. In those years I also got to know Betty Benson and Bridget Gazzo, who became my good friends and, at crucial times, key resources. Opportunities arose to participate in ongoing Dumbarton Oaks projects such as writing, with Janet Catherine Berlo, the introductory essay for her edited volume on Teotihuacan.

In the early 1980s my research focus was a rural Aztec period village (occupied ca. CE 1200 to 1603) in the Teotihuacan Valley, Mexico. With a National Science Foundation grant I had excavated a fair sample of Cihuatecpan (“Woman-Palace”) village, including a house three times the size of the next largest. This discovery moved my life in a new direction for unexpected reasons. I had met my goal of revealing the lives of the commoners, but also uncovered the only Aztec palace ever completely excavated in the Basin of Mexico. That big house was a small but clear example of the Aztec tecpan, “lord-place”.

It took me a while to figure out that the structure was a tecpan-palace, because no one had comprehensively studied the archaeology of Aztec palaces. These properties were coveted by the Spanish conquistadores and rebuilt in Spanish style, so very few archaeological remains have survived. But the sixteenth-century chroniclers gave good descriptions of palaces and courtly life, and I learned just how rich these ethnohistorical resources were when I began to research the topic at the Dumbarton Oaks library, with its impressive holdings of facsimile editions of codices, and the most recent Spanish and English editions of all important studies from Mexico and the U.S. My research monograph on Cihuatecpan (1988) owed much to what I was learning at Dumbarton Oaks, and I needed to focus on the palace.

Where better to delve the identity of the Aztec palace than in the buried treasure of the Pre-Columbian Library at Dumbarton Oaks? My fellowship year (1995–1996), devoted to learning about the Aztec palace, was an intellectual watershed, first because I learned so much from my uninterrupted time in the library and second because of the new directions my months at D.O. provided. It was also tremendously enriching to be living in Georgetown with access to Washington’s cultural resources, and meet wonderful people who would remain close colleagues and friends.

At a research presentation that fall I met Joanne Pillsbury and we immediately bonded as palace people. She was investigating what would be a radical innovation in Andean studies – identifying huge residential complexes as palaces. Palace-related issues absorbed our attention and we realized that no one had ever brought together basic descriptions of elite residential architecture in the key culture areas of the New World. It was a natural topic for a Dumbarton Oaks summer workshop and a symposium and edited volume, and those projects were developed and had satisfying success. Joanne and I remain trusted colleagues and good friends.

When I began my fellowship year, Jeff Quilter was beginning his term as Director of Pre-Columbian Studies. We had been trained in the same anthropologically-oriented tradition of modern U.S. archaeology, and understood each other as scholars, sharing many interests and the same kind of sense of humor. David and I enjoyed getting to know Jeff and his wife Sarah. Other Pre-Columbian fellows that year were Sue Bergh and Oswaldo Chinchilla, and we have kept in touch.

It was one of the first years that La Quercia was in use, and George Brock, one of the house staff at Dumbarton Oaks, was our resident concierge and local hero. La Quercia was newly refurbished and besides had George as a steward of the building, and so most things were in good working order. George also saw to it that our larger experience as resident fellows in Washington, D.C. was as memorable as the high quality of Dumbarton Oaks’s libraries.

Jeff Quilter has joked that I looked at every book in the D.O. Pre-Columbian library, and that is a flattering exaggeration. I didn’t look at works pertaining to South America unless I had a particular lead on a topic of interest. Otherwise, I trolled the indexes where possible, and came to use the presence of a useful comprehensive index as a strong measure of the author or editor’s scholarly competence. There was a set of about a dozen topics that I sought, reflecting palace-related subjects but also other ongoing interests. I worked my way through that library very systematically, and photocopied important works so that I could continue research after the fellowship year was over. (Recall that this was 1995–96, which might as well be the Upper Paleolithic in terms of research resources available “on line” -- the card catalogues occupied a lot of space in the Rare Book Room.) I skimmed thousands of books to find the information I needed and I was richly rewarded, even finding a previously unknown ethnohistorical reference to Cihuatecpan, the village I had excavated. A D.O. round table meeting in spring 1996 led to further Aztec palace research.

All through the winter of 1995–1996, those of us working in the basement of the Main House enjoyed the spectacle of sub-sub-basement exploration by teams of technicians installing a new telephone system. Renovation and exploration crews were constantly going through Pre-Columbian Studies in the basement, on their way down to the second or even third basement. Ken Johnson, as new guy, got the most challenging assignments at spelunking and his great attitude suggested that he had a strong future at D.O. We scholars, working long hours in the Main House, got to know the staff and their standard of excellence in maintaining and protecting the buildings and gardens. As Dumbarton Oaks became more technically sophisticated, Pete Haggerty and Jo Ann Murray joined the staff and became tech gurus for all of us who worked there.

When, later, I lived in the Fellows Building on and off for years, I had morning kitchen conversations in the Fellows Building with Lila Guillen and I remember Nora Escobar when she first worked there; I enjoy talking with her these days when she’s working the desk in the Library or Main Building. We who continue to stay in the Guest House appreciate Mario García’s work at maintaining it. Carlos Méndez and I have known each other for years, and I admire his recently unleashed party planning skills with regard to a recent Speakers Dinner. And Hector Paz’s range as a chef is admirable; he readily achieves food that has great flavor and is calorically affordable.

In the winter of 1995–1996, all of us at D.O. became aware that the Main Building was a very old and complicated building, and it was most challenged by the elements during the great snowstorm of January 1996, with attendant power outage in D.O. -- the city was paralyzed. When Dumbarton Oaks reopened, the city was still blanketed with snow, gradually restoring its grid of streets to working order, but upper east Georgetown was among the last to get dug out. The walk to and from La Quercia along R Street, very pleasant in nice weather, became magical in a sheath of white that lasted and lasted. Moreover, one felt perfectly safe walking home to La Quercia at night on R Street, unlikely to meet a mugger on the bright, beautiful, nearly impassable street.

Research into Aztec palaces led inevitably to research into Aztec monumental gardens (e.g. Chapultepec Park, first developed as a monumental garden in the 1420s, and Texcotzingo, possibly the world’s first botanical garden) and this led to informal conversations about garden design matters with John Dixon Hunt, Joaquim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Michel Conan. These conversations led to publications about monumental gardens, and participation in a Landscape Studies symposium and volume. These days I enjoy conversations with John Beardsley as we compare and contrast ancient and modern solutions to the challenge of the twenty-first century’s “new oil”: water.

The late 1990s brought continued contact with Dumbarton Oaks as Joanne Pillsbury and I prepared for our summer seminar and symposium on palaces of the New World. The summer seminar brought together Mesoamericanists (George Andrews, Enrique Gonzalez Licon, David Webster, and me) and Andeanists (Joanne, Bill Isbell). We were trying to hammer out the normative values of New World palaces and elite residences (types of plan, sizes, relation to community, etc.) because this basic comparison had never been done before and would create a solid baseline of types, a prerequisite for further interpretation. Moreover, it would help those of us who were participating in the upcoming symposium and preparing our summary statements. I began to think about how the Aztec palace related to those of Tula and West Mexico, how it related to those of Teotihuacan. We got along well and worked hard, and of course the sheer gorgeous luxury of Dumbarton Oaks in summer creates a strong sense of well-being.

We lunched in what can here correctly be called The Fellows Building. The dining room was in the same place then as now, and we used to have interesting conversations among seminar group and also with others we knew – Glenn Ruby, head of publications, or some of the Byzantinists or Landscape people. Ned Keenan was new as Director and would sometimes lunch with us. He was a great proponent of computerization of print media and education, and one lunch time he argued passionately against paper-borne information, promising to prove to us that no one ever used the old paper volumes in the basement compact stacks. We followed him back to the Main Building, through the foyer and down the winding stairs, while he continued to inveigh against paper books. The farthest compact stack pair was open, and when he got there, Keenan was non-plussed to find a serious-looking young woman sitting on the floor of the gap, clearly doing research. When he said “What are you *doing* here?!?” she looked completely dumbfounded, not without reason.

The summer seminaristas got along well, though Bill Isbell and I had a running disagreement about the importance of post-modernism to scholarship. One day the pre-Columbianist table gave rise to (drumroll) raised voices. It was basically Bill and I who raised our voices, and we determinedly parted on good terms after lunch – and just then Bill’s wife arrived for a weekend visit. Bill had in fact wooed his wife years before when he was a D.O. Fellow and she was Associate Director of Studies – Judy Siggins, noted scholar and one of my favorite people, was in the mood for a cup of coffee and some catch-up conversation with me, which was immensely fun and relaxing. It was a good example of how the D.O. people-network is so interwoven. I had first met Judy in the early 1980s – Elizabeth Boone introduced us, and the three of us enjoyed the occasional Fellows Building lunch, or dinner and a movie – and we had kept in contact at D.O. symposia and Society for American Archaeology meetings.

We of the seminar were living in La Quercia that summer (except, of course, for Joanne), and David and I had apartment 206 (or as the dangling number read, 209). In the rear, this apartment overlooks the alley and driveways and interesting backs of wonderful-looking Georgetown houses, and if I worked at the table by the window it was like the set of a benign “Rear Window.” Walking to the D.O. campus from La Quercia in that and other summers, I always slowed down along Montrose Park because they had a large planting of lavender around the fountain and the fragrance was so refreshing – I have since begun a long bed of lavender around the edge of the big farm pond on our property.

To float on our Pennsylvania pond in summer, watching the hawks and smelling the lavender, is a transcendently pleasant experience, and it shares space on life’s short list with being in or around the pool at Dumbarton Oaks. Whenever I was living at D.O., I was in the pool every day that conditions allowed. A lousy swimmer, I got myself a water-exercise flotation belt and did my half hours of laps without getting my face wet. My favorite time at the pool was seven AM and I always felt lucky if I had the space to myself because, while there were other places in the world that were as beautiful, the simple quiet experience of this place, in this garden, could not be surpassed.

And this attitude led to one of my least poised moments at Dumbarton Oaks. No, not that morning in late October when the gardeners walking through the pool area paused and asked if I needed help as I hauled my shivering self out after one lap (water temp, 59°). No, this was when Don Pumphrey, the famously laconic Head of Grounds, asked me a direct question for the first time in the years of our acquaintance: What did I like best about Dumbarton Oaks? “The pool!” I blurted out. Within nanoseconds I realized that to maintain a reputation as a serious scholar and caring human being I should have said “the library!” or “the collection!” or “the people!” But such is my gratitude to the shimmering space centered upon the D.O. pool that when considered from the perspective of a consistently rewarding experience, time in the pool was always a serenely mindful meditation.

Our palaces symposium in mid-October was a success – the papers were mostly strong and on topic, and Joanne and I appreciated the lively interchanges among our colleagues. In late October I turned my attention to plans for my Mesoamerican overview book – the 20 page outline was due at the publisher by the end of the month. The book would become Ancient Mexico and Central America: Archaeology and Culture History; the first edition won the Society for American Archaeology’s Book Award. The book was an outgrowth of my editorship of the encyclopedia Archaeology of Ancient Mexico and Central America, and for both these projects the D.O. library was a great help, and so were the people encountered at Dumbarton Oaks – including D.O.’s greater community of scholars, others like me who had been made to feel welcome and made visiting Dumbarton Oaks a regular part of their schedule.

In late 1998, Joanne and I got to work pulling the symposium volume into shape. We looked ahead to an uncomplicated publication process, and had emphasized to our authors the need to move expeditiously. As sometimes happens, misunderstandings occurred between editors and one or two authors. Some papers unrelated to the larger topic were withdrawn, leaving a couple of major culture areas unmentioned. In consequence, essential features of elite residential architecture in these culture areas were reassigned to existing papers. And so my paper on Aztec palaces also presented the basics of palaces in Teotihuacan and Tula. The symposium volume is now in a paperback edition.

As Director of Pre-Columbian Studies, Jeff Quilter had inherited the ongoing project of publishing the first new edition of the catalogue of the Bliss Collection in nearly fifty years. The Andean volumes had been published under Elizabeth Boone’s directorship and the Olmec volume was nearly ready for the Publications Office.

As planned in the series, the “Central Mexico” volume would cover the Bliss Collection’s objects from the Central Highlands and adjacent regions. Several art historians had considered taking on editorship but then realized that their schedules didn’t permit them to come to Dumbarton Oaks for a fellowship term to lay the project’s groundwork, select co-authors, and address research issues pertaining to their own share of the write-ups and articles. Jeff knew that I had managed the production of the Mesoamerican encyclopedia manuscript, with hundreds of authors and my own organizational plan, so I could probably deal with the catalogue project and its half-dozen authors and topics. Plus, by then I knew every stage of the book production process and had a fairly comprehensive knowledge of my field and my colleagues. Jeff felt that these were all positive signs of an ability to bring the project to completion, and thus the catalogue series would continue on course.

Frankly, I was daunted (this turned out to be fully justified, as the years passed) and told Jeff that I wasn’t really an “objects person” but Jeff pointed out that my experience as a field archaeologist meant that I was of course an “objects” person. Technically, in the art historical sense, I was correct about not being an “objects person” at that time, but again, Dumbarton Oaks gave me a fabulous opportunity to grow as a scholar and I became a hybrid archaeologist-art historian objects person, using the resources of the library and the collection, the objects themselves, training myself to see in the objects the attributes essential to a proper art-historical description and analysis. Interactions with Betty and Elizabeth and Joanne were an immense help in this regard, and Jeff was also building a reputation as an archaeologist with a strong art-historical perspective.

It was during this time that I got to know Sue Boyd, then Curator of the Byzantine Collection, and I can thank Dumbarton Oaks for arranging yet another memorable friendship. We have since enjoyed socializing, and she and David and I went together on a tour of Egypt. When I met her, it was to borrow a book that the D.O. library didn’t have, but she did. The book was Fake and I needed to read it as part of a quick study about this chronic problem in the world of art history and art galleries. You would think that a field archaeologist would know about such things, but my specialty was Aztec rural sites, and no one would bother to fake those pot sherds. I read all I could about fakes and how they were detected, because it was possible that some objects in the Bliss Collection were more recently manufactured than previously supposed. There were many questions about the carved greenstone Figure in the Act of Childbirth (Tlazolteotl), now believed to be in the style of Aztec sculpture rather than from the Aztec period. The sibling piece, Rabbit, is also unlikely to have been made and finished five hundred years ago.

The carved jade disks were not at risk in this assessment. The material, type of sculpting and finishing all seem completely authentic. Down in the Rare Book Room of the Pre-Columbian Studies Library, I would don purple latex gloves to handle the jade disks, and I would wonder at their origin. I worked a lot in the Rare Book Room as the catalogue came together, and I remember the day in June 2002 that several things clicked, with the Bliss Collection’s jade disks and Teotihuacan mural (and Teo vessels) as material springboards for approaching multiple features of Teotihuacan and its culture: the iconography of the disk motif (in the Bliss Collection’s disks, the Teotihuacan mural and vessels – and all over Mesoamerica in the Classic period, always signifying Teotihuacan), the meaning of the mural’s water temple, springs and canals, the relationship of water to political power, the timing of the layout of the city’s grid of apartment compounds with the city’s drainage system, which then fed the nearby system of canal-gridded drained fields (“chinampas”) – highly productive agriculture in a challenging setting.

I thought back on the day twenty-five years before, in the town of San Juan Teotihuacan, that my mentor William Sanders took us grad students into the walled confines of the cathedral close, where a verdant pool evidenced one of the last of the old springs that once burbled out at the southwest edge of the ancient city. They watered a drained field area so fertile that a local population of tens of thousands could be supported. Bill explained that powerful factions always try to control water sources, and thus the Colonial period church moved quickly to build on this property and secure this valuable water source. They may have built over a native water temple, like the one on the Dumbarton Oaks mural. Water was the principle reason for the existence of Teotihuacan, and my research into the Bliss Collection objects brought together so many pieces – from iconography to crop yields – of the puzzle that is Teotihuacan.

Tracing these relationships at Teotihuacan and exploring this iconography has become an ongoing focus of my research and scholarly output, with the catalogue itself, of course being the first and primary presentation of my findings and interpretations. Working on the catalogue gave me space to review the existing literature on these matters, heightening the catalogue’s timeliness and relevance. The harvest from my association with Dumbarton Oaks continues with upcoming and recent articles, public lectures, book projects. I am currently writing a book about Teotihuacan’s rise and fall, from the perspective of access to water as a dominant feature development.

In a sense, the experience of being put in charge of the presentation of these objects by Dumbarton Oaks to the public prompted a new phase of my palace research, because these objects were surely the accoutrements of the elites and the output of elite workshops. To plan the catalogue and begin research, I was offered a one-term fellowship, but opted instead to take my research days twelve at a time – typically, a Monday morning to the next week’s Friday afternoon – over the course of the next few years. I believe that because of this “intermittent fellowship” (my term, not D.O.’s) I became the particular demon in the life of Marlene Chazan, Dumbarton Oaks’s able long-time financial officer, but it was not my intention to annoy -- my choice was dictated by other obligations and my own nature: I am basically a home-loving person who enjoyed the opportunity to spend significant and well-planned stretches of days at Dumbarton Oaks focusing on the catalogue project and living in the Fellows Building, particularly appreciating Room 7 for its morning light.

If the beauty and comprehensiveness of the completed catalogue volume indicate level of success, then all of us who worked on it deserve hearty congratulations. There were many challenges. The process of coordinating the production of the articles was complicated by communication problems among project participants. Furthermore, these were the years of major campus development and renovation of the Main Building, so the objects were put in storage. In addition, the D.O. Publications Office was hit by the sudden passing of its leader, Glenn Ruby, and it was several years before a steady course was restored.

Changes in the Publications Office leadership had an immediate and costly impact on the catalogue volume. As originally submitted in a format approved by Glenn, the articles varied considerably in length – because the objects varied considerably in interest and importance. Under the new policies of the reorganized Publications Office, however, I was instructed to standardize all articles to 2,000 words. I was dismayed with this directive, and so were my authors. I did my best to ameliorate hard feelings, but in conforming to this policy good will was lost along with extended treatments of some of the Bliss Collection’s greatest pieces (the mural, the dart thrower). In time, new Publication Office administration led by Kathy Sparkes revisited these policies and instituted a format that permitted in depth treatment of the most important objects. She and Sara Taylor saw that the volume made us all very proud.

Coincidentally, as I worked on completion of the catalogue and other projects, my husband, David Webster, was appointed as a Senior Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies. David is one of the most knowledgeable and fair-minded people I know, with great common sense and dedication to duty, so he had excellent qualifications for the appointment. It was tremendously enjoyable for both of us to be a part of the festivities of each special meeting, and as David’s spouse I felt completely welcome to the memorable parties.

David will soon come to the end of his term as Senior Fellow, and my current publication projects will depend on continued access to the library, but are not Dumbarton Oaks products. Soon, though. I did so much research on the Net Jaguar and Mural – and jadeite disks – that I have everything ready to develop it into a nice contribution to D.O.’s Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology Studies Series. And in 2013, David and I will be attending Steve Houston’s weekend workshop on Piedras Negras, at Dumbarton Oaks. I look forward to all of these opportunities to remain an active part of the Dumbarton Oaks community.

]]>No publisherPre-Columbian CollectionFieldworkSummer FellowCollectionFellowOral History ProjectAztecSymposiumFellowsArchaeologySpecialArchives2013/06/05 09:23:33 GMT-4Page50 Years of Pre-Columbian Art at Dumbarton Oakshttp://www.doaks.org/news-events/newsletter/news-archives/50-years-of-pre-columbian-art-at-dumbarton-oaks
Robert Woods Bliss collected with passion and exacting care. Between 1912 and his death in 1962, he acquired works of art from some thirty ancient American cultures, many of them previously unstudied. His predilection for fine workmanship, high quality materials, and interesting or unusual designs shaped the collection – and in no small part, the emerging field of Pre-Columbian studies.

Committed to the dissemination of knowledge about Pre-Columbian art, Bliss collaborated widely to publish and exhibit his pieces. The National Gallery of Art hosted an exhibition of Bliss objects from 1947 to 1962. In 1963, wishing to display his collection in perpetuity, Bliss donated it to Dumbarton Oaks for installation in the museum’s new Pre-Columbian wing, designed by Philip Johnson.

In 2013, Dumbarton Oaks celebrates 50 years of Pre-Columbian art in the Philip Johnson Pavilion. Select artworks on loan from international and American museums join the permanent collection: a gilded Mixtec atlatl, a painted Maya figurine, ancient glyphs, and delicate Andean mosaics all highlight recent research and create new connections and contrasts between objects and cultures. After five decades, the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art continues to incite scholarly inquiry, reveal ancient craftsmanship, and delight the eye of the viewer.

]]>No publisherPhilip JohnsonDumbarton Oaks MuseumPre-Columbian CollectionRobert Woods BlissPre-Columbian Pavilion2013/01/09 16:05:00 GMT-4News Item2013 Dumbarton Oaks Anniversarieshttp://www.doaks.org/news-events/newsletter/news-archives/2013-dumbarton-oaks-anniversaries
A note from Director Jan ZiolkowskiIn 2013 Dumbarton Oaks will celebrate the fifty-year anniversaries of two important constructions: the Rare Book Reading Room, which houses our rare and unique books and manuscripts; and the Philip Johnson Pavilion, which displays our collection of Pre-Columbian works of art. The two wings, though both completed in 1963, could not be more distinct in style.

Interior view of the Rare Book Reading Room

The Rare Book Reading Room, which stands at the southwest end of the main building, was designed by the architect Frederic Rhinelander King (1887–1972). King, cousin of the novelist Edith Wharton, belonged to the same social orbit as Robert Woods Bliss (1875–1962) and Mildred Barnes Bliss (1879–1969), who donated Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard University in 1940. King’s design, aimed to recall the grandeur of the French eighteenth century, is well suited to the historical nature of the rare books, drawings, and manuscripts it houses. The look speaks to a strong strain within American culture that seeks out inspiration in the Old World and Enlightenment.

Exterior view of the Philip Johnson Pavilion

Projecting to the north of the main building, in the opposite direction from the Reading Room, are the eight domes, with a central fountain, that constitute the Philip Johnson Pavilion. Commissioned in 1959 to showcase the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art, it is remarkable for its interaction with the trees surrounding it. Thanks to their curves and glassiness, the octet of curving cells blends in with the nature around it, and the objects displayed within seem to float against the world outside. At the same time the architecture gestures to the Islamic world, particularly to Turkish structures of the Ottoman period. In sum, the Pavilion is anything but traditional European in either its design or its artworks (if the term artworks is not itself a Western imposition!).

Robert Bliss did not survive to witness the completion of the two edifices, since he died the year before, but his widow Mildred lived on through most of the decade. It is a tribute to the scope and flexibility they retained even as octogenarians that they should have envisioned a complex of buildings that could harmonize two additions as distinct in style and function as the Rare Book Reading Room and Philip Johnson Pavilion have been for the past half century.

To mark the anniversaries, we will celebrate not just the spaces themselves but also the uses for which they were established. The Blisses intended their buildings, grounds, and collections to serve both advanced scholars and the general public. Without interrupting experts who need library materials and without jeopardizing the proper protection of those materials, we are planning a series of small guided tours to the Rare Book Reading Room and the Philip Johnson Pavilion. Visits will be complemented by an ambitious calendar of talks, lectures, workshops, colloquia, and symposia. Through such activities we do our part to uphold the causes of the humanities and advanced research, while familiarizing the public with our complex missions—in historic preservation, innovative scholarship, and broad dissemination—and demonstrating their ultimate oneness.

]]>No publisherPhilip JohnsonDumbarton Oaks MuseumPre-Columbian CollectionDumbarton Oaks Research LibraryRare Book Reading RoomPre-Columbian Pavilion2013/01/09 16:02:35 GMT-4News ItemJames N. Carderhttp://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/james-n.-carder
Oral History Interview with James N. Carder, undertaken by Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent, Elizabeth Gettinger, and Anne Steptoe in the Dumbarton Oaks Guest House (Fellows Building) on July 15, 2009. At Dumbarton Oaks, James Carder was a Junior Fellow of Byzantine Studies (1974–1976) and the Manager of the House Collection (since 1992) and Archivist (since 1999).JNSL: Today is Wednesday, July 15, 2009. My name is Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent.

EG: Elizabeth Gettinger.

AS: And Anne Steptoe.

JNSL: We have the honor today of interviewing James Carder. We are here at Dumbarton Oaks to speak with the Archivist. Do you guys want to start with a question?

EG: Sure. So, I guess just a sort of start up question – we see that you were a Junior Fellow here in the '70s?

JNC: Yes, I was.

EG: And so we wanted to hear how you first got involved with Dumbarton Oaks and what your initial impressions were.

JNC: I actually first got involved very modestly when I was an undergraduate. I was working on an excavation in Yugoslavia at the Palace of the emperor Diocletian and wanted to read an eighteenth-century description of the palace by Robert Adam, a rare volume of which the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine library had a copy. And I somewhat naively came to Washington to work in the library as an undergraduate and learned – then as now – that undergraduates don't have easy entree, but I did manage to get a photocopy of that book sent to me, which was otherwise hard to come by. I was on a Ford Foundation Archaeological Traineeship Grant, so there was money for doing that sort of thing. So, that was my first introduction in the later '60s, and then when I went to graduate school I applied for a Junior Fellowship and received it, as you said. It was a two-year – it turned into a two-year fellowship at that time and I finished my dissertation at Dumbarton Oaks.

EG: So, what was the fellowship program like when you first arrived here?

JNC: It was, I think, pretty much the same as it is today in many important aspects. Like today there were more Byzantine Fellows than Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Architecture Fellows. One difference that I remember, and I think it might have been both a difference of chance and possibly a difference of design, was that there were more art historians in the mix of Fellows than there has been in subsequent periods. There were easily five if not six art historians in my group, which made for a very nice situation in terms of getting intellectual stimulation from your peers. Ioli Kalavrezou was a Junior Fellow as was Ruth Kolarik and Jeffrey Andrews and Kathleen Shelton. And Rob Nelson was a Junior Fellow in my second year. And besides that, Otto Demus and Hugo Buchthal and Carlo Bertelli were Fellows, and Ernst Kitzinger came occasionally from Harvard. And, of course, Bill Loerke was Director of Studies, so there were a lot of Byzantine and Early Christian art historians around. The other thing that I remember very much about my fellowship years was that there was a great camaraderie, and the Fellows themselves organized parties and all sorts of events, sometimes costume parties, where, for example, at Seka Allen’s home, we put on elaborate silk and brocade clothes and masqueraded as some historical figure, real or imagined!

JNSL: What did you dress up like?

JNC: I think I was an emperor. It wasn't very – my costume wasn’t particularly successful, as I remember, but I tried. Many of the staff, including Sue Boyd, who was assistant or associate Byzantine curator at the time, as well as Seka Allen – Jelisaveta Allen – a research librarian – were very conscientious in inviting Fellows to their houses or otherwise organizing events for them. There was a real spirit of being part of a group that was well taken care of.

AS: Did this social camaraderie extend between Byzantine and Pre-Columbian fellows, or was it more of a Byzantine community?

JNC: It did extend among all of the Fellows. I believe – and I really should check the archival record on this – that there couldn't have been more than two Pre-Columbian Fellows and maybe only two Landscape fellows, or possibly only one. The numbers in those junior programs – junior in the sense that they came later in the institutional chronology than the Byzantine Studies program – and really only began having Fellows in the early ‘70s. I remember Frank Alvarez in Garden and Landscape and Peter Joralemon in Pre-Columbian. But even though there were only three or four non-Byzantine Fellows, I think they were always included in the parties. Then occasionally there were Byzantine-specific activities, such as an exhibition at the Walters or something like that – then it was just the Byzantine group that went.

EG: How did you find the atmosphere here academically; was it an easy place to work on your dissertation? What resources were of the most value?

JNC: It was a dream. I didn't have too much to compare it to, though I'd had a Fulbright the year before I came here in Germany, and I was using primary material libraries in Wolfenbüttel and elsewhere and not necessarily so much using secondary resources. But I had that as a benchmark. But here, even before I came, I received communications asking what microfilms or -fiches I might need that I would be expecting to work on as they wanted to check whether they had them or not. And if they didn't have them, they'd do what they could to get them, which I just found wonderful and remarkable. I don't think I ever needed a secondary resource, a book or whatever, that they didn't have or couldn't get. And at that time there was a liaison person to the Library of Congress, and he had the wherewithal to make a weekly trip to the Library of Congress and bring back materials that Fellows and others had requested. I don't think that program lasted much longer, but it certainly was in effect the two years I was here and that, of course, just doubled the possibilities of doing research. So, I thought the resources at Dumbarton Oaks were terrific, as I believe people continue to think to this day.

AS: Were there any academic mentors that you met and became close with during those two years?

JNC: Yes. As you probably know from the history of Dumbarton Oaks, there actually were, in the early period, faculty members – permanent faculty members – here, and that was just being dissolved, in a way. But Ernst Kitzinger was still here – or at least occasionally – when I was a Junior Fellow. Although he was frankly more in Cambridge than at Dumbarton Oaks, though he did come to Dumbarton Oaks for several months and, so, he did have a presence. And he and I discussed many aspects of my dissertation. Hugo Buchthal, I don't think, had a professorship but he had an appointment of some sort while I was here, and he was invaluable. And then people like Kurt Weitzmann would come around, and he had asked me to write some catalogue entries for the “Age of Spirituality” exhibition that he was planning for the Met, so we knew each other in a way, and his advice was great. But I also think that my peers were terrific. We did the same thing that's done today, we gave progress reports on our dissertation topics or our research topics depending on our level. And it wasn't pro forma; people thought about them and critiqued them, and if there was some tangent that perhaps the speaker hadn't considered, someone in the group might say you should look at this book or you should consider this primary source of some ancient author and see what they have to say. I found it invaluable.

AS: How often did those occur?

JNC: Those research reports? I think on average once a week, as they do now, scattered throughout the academic term – followed incidentally by a sherry hour. There was also sherry served before lunch on Tuesdays, I think it was. I think Jan has now revived this and has it at his house, but that apparently was a tradition that Mildred Bliss had inaugurated before her death in 1969, and I don't know if it had continued unabated until my tenure here in the mid-'70s, but I think it then sort of fell off the board soon thereafter.

JNSL: Did you ever hear any anecdotes from the older, say, the older Fellows or older scholars about Dumbarton Oaks while you were here as a Junior Fellow or any stories about some of the early days that caught your ear or that stand out in your memory?

JNC: I didn't – I don't remember much, if I did, and so consequently I think I didn't. I heard innumerable times the story about climbing over the perimeter walls to swim illegally in the swimming pool. I must have heard that fifty times from fifty different people or people reporting on their best friends who had come over the wall at night to swim, and otherwise I don't remember anything either boring or juicy. I'm not sure how much I was really aware, too, of the institution and its institutional history. I don't know how much I was aware of the Blisses, although I did meet Jack Thacher who was still alive at the time. I had a friend at the Carnegie Museum of Art, David Owsley, a curator, who knew Jack Thacher, apparently fairly well, and he suggested, since he knew I was coming as a Junior Fellow, that I – that Jack Thacher invite me over for tea or something, which he did. He talked about the Blisses, and I remember now that you mention it, thinking that I should somehow know more about the Blisses. It's too bad I don't have a time machine and could go back, as I know a great deal more now. But he talked about Mildred Bliss at this tea.

JNSL: And how did you come into your current position today? What was the story behind that journey?

JNC: When I finished my dissertation and left Dumbarton Oaks, I started as an assistant professor, first at Case Western Reserve University while someone was on sabbatical, and then I came back to Washington where I was at Mount Vernon College and then at George Washington University at the Mount Vernon Campus. And in 1989, I received notification from Sue Boyd that there was a notice of a job position – but it was a part time job position – at Dumbarton Oaks for someone to advise on the objects that are now formally known as the House Collection. Apparently, the president of Harvard University had received some letters questioning whether some objects were in the best care, and the president had written to then director Angeliki Laiou, asking if there was curatorial responsibility for these prints and drawings that were hanging on walls and that sort of thing. And so she realized in a way that there wasn't – there was a Byzantine curator and a Pre-Columbian curator and so forth, but the so-called House Collection was not particularly well situated in anyone's sight lines. So, I interviewed with her and was offered this job, and the first element of it was to do an assessment, a condition assessment of things – especially things of value – and things that were possibly in harm's way. And I did that, and while I was doing that assessment I was also trying to get any information on these objects, because there were no dossier files and, really, no sort of curatorial management for this part of the Collection – the House Collection, as we know it today. So, I was bothering people asking where invoices might be kept or where conservation reports might be kept, and so forth. And that caught Angeliki Laiou's attention. So, she asked me to start putting together a complete dossier for the House Collection. You can see the snowball moving down the hill here!

EG: When was that?

JNC: This started in '89, as an advisor; and I became a staff member in ’92. So, I was here during her entire tenure. When Ned Keenan came, early on he talked to me and said that he wanted to revisit the new library project and even revisit it situated under the North Vista – that very controversial location where it had started out in the 1970s. He said, “I need to find all the plans and all of the correspondence and documents from the '70s to see where things were left off.” And so he went around looking for them, and of course there was no Archives at the time and things were where you might least likely think they should be. But since I had also taken this route trying to put together things for the House Collection dossiers and had literally looked in the attic and in the basement and in people's file drawers – really just any place – I had something of an unwritten road map of where things were. So, I was actually able to put my hands on these drawings which I knew to be rolled and stored under this building in not the best of circumstances, and I also was able to put my hands on the correspondence files. But there was no logic to it, and they were in cardboard boxes, and I think they were labeled but there wasn't any reason to know that they were there. So he was both horrified – Ned Keenan was – and relieved, and he said, “Would you be willing to take on the reorganization of the archives in much the same way as you took on the dossier building of the House Collection?” And I said, “Yes.” So, that's how I came to be House Collection Manager and then later Archivist.

EG: So, what were some of the goals of the archives project and what was the organization of it?

JNC: The mission of the Dumbarton Oaks Archives is to retain and conserve in perpetuity any item that is of importance to the institutional history of Dumbarton Oaks. And that, of course, can be interpreted broadly or narrowly, and a caveat to that is to understand the physical limitations of space, at least in terms of hard copy or hard object storage. So, not every scrap of paper that happens to have survived is fair game for the Archives because it would overwhelm the real estate. So, the first objective was to find out what was still around that really was critical to retain and, if it was in deteriorating condition, what to do to make an analog copy of it somehow to keep its shelf-life going. Then, to find a way to organize it so that it could be easily accessed by people who would want to see this material in the future, and to weed out things – but not capriciously – weed out things that shouldn't be saved. And so I spent the first two years of my life as an archivist just interviewing people in their offices and seeing and telling them that I thought that it was very fair game if they were actively using files or materials that these files should continue to reside with them, as that was a very good use of institutional space and resources. But, if they had things that were just clogging their file cabinets that they themselves felt should be retained for the institutional memory, these should come to the Archives. And so, things began to flow in, and it was greatly interesting to me to make coherency out of all these disparate files and images and objects. And the system I devised now can be added to very easily. For example, when Alice-Mary Talbot retired recently – although she had been a very faithful contributor to the Archives – she did one final sweep of her office files and took things out that she didn't think Margaret Mullett would necessarily need and sent them down to the Archives, and that's how it's grown. And it works pretty well, as I think you can attest because you've been using files from the Archives.

AS: What role do you see the Archives playing at DO?

JNC: It has an absolutely critical role in that we've never written either a periodic history, other than the annual reports or biannual reports, or an official history of the institution. There are a number of history-like discussions – the Pre-Columbian Studies program has a good one and so forth. But, there's a lot of very important institutional activity from the past that hasn’t been chronicled in a historical narrative, but it is captured in the correspondence and in the interim reports to the president of Harvard University and so forth, and this material sits waiting for someone to rediscover it. And this material really informs us as to what happened and what people thought they were doing and how they went about their business as they defined it at the time. And it shows that there were mistakes and how people learned from them and how the institution moved on. I think every institution needs an archives and it should use its archives to find out who it was. Here we also use the Archives to check when scholars propose things to us – either fellowship applications or research proposals or what have you. We can go back and see what they've done for the institution before, what we have on file. It's not always complete, but it’s very useful. And unfortunately when a scholar dies we often use the preserved archival material for writing an obituary, because sometimes we're the institution that has the best knowledge of the contribution that that particular scholar has made to the field of Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Studies

JNSL: Could you perhaps comment on the uniqueness of Dumbarton Oaks in terms of an institution and what its mission is – both the museum and the professional library, the fellowship program, and its sort of general position here in Washington?

JNC: In a certain sense, Dumbarton Oaks is not unique, in that it's a research institute. There are many research institutes, and they tend to have all of the same phenomena: they have libraries, they occasionally have collections that support the focus of the research, they have a fellowship apparatus, and so forth. But Dumbarton Oaks is, to a degree, unique, and part of its uniqueness is the mandate of its founders, the Blisses. They wanted the institute Dumbarton Oaks to be in Washington, D.C., and although it was to be administered in many ways through Harvard University, they did not want it at Harvard, and during their lifetime they were very clear on that point. They thought things that happened at Harvard were perfectly wonderful and that the student body and the faculty interaction with the student body and all of these good things were what a university of great standing such as Harvard should have. But, for them Dumbarton Oaks was something other, it was, in a way, a retreat, and although they wouldn't have used and didn't use the term “ivory tower,” in a way it was just that. Dumbarton Oaks was something other than an urban campus, it was sixteen acres of beautiful gardens, it had an ambiance of sophistication and, to a degree, elegance in the architecture and appointments of that architecture. It allowed people the breathing space and the environment in which to be reflective in their studies. And then, of course, the studies programs themselves are not your average studies programs. You don't have a choice in Byzantine studies between twenty different research studies programs so that you might apply to them all and choose the best one that responds. If you're a Byzantinist and are going to go to a research institute in America, Dumbarton Oaks' Byzantine studies program is probably the first and, to a degree, only choice, and Pre-Columbian and Garden and Landscape Architecture are very similar. In a way, the narrow foci of this institute ensure its quality and ensure its ability to remain vibrant and relevant. If we did twelve other things from ancient to contemporary abstract expressionist studies programs, we would dilute ourselves. You have to be very wealthy to do that. CASVA is very successful because of its high level of funding and amazing resources. But to be a CASVA you have to be very wealthy and you also have to be very astute at what you collect as research materials and what mix of people you bring together in a far-ranging research institute. So the very small focal nature of Dumbarton Oaks makes it unique, I believe.

EG: Could you speak a little bit about the relationship between the Dumbarton Oaks Archives and the Bliss archives at Harvard which I believe were moved to Harvard in the '80s?

JNC: In 1982, right? In 1982. That was, of course, before my time. I believe from what I've read is that the Blisses themselves had deposited at Dumbarton Oaks a considerable collection of their correspondence and memorabilia. How well organized it was and how topically organized it was I can't say because I know it was completely rethought and re-catalogued at Harvard and wonderfully so. The woman who took that on as a six-year project – I don't believe she was working on it full time necessarily, but I think she was working on it consistently – she did a really remarkable job putting together a first rate finding aid and so forth. Anyway, Dumbarton Oaks had this on its premises, and it had other related things that the Blisses themselves had not accumulated. And the librarians here put this material into folders and boxes because they were, I think and rightfully, concerned about it: one, in terms of making sure that it didn't get lost or misused or thrown out or left to deterioration, and two, they were concerned that they didn't really have the physical room to store it. Until the new library was built, the Main House, as you well know, served as the complete campus with the exception of the Fellows Building, and that really wasn't used for much other than the purpose of feeding and housing Fellows. So, the Main House was really everything: it was library, it was research space, it was meeting space, it was museum space, it was everything, and as Ned Keenan was fond of saying, it was at two hundred percent capacity when he came as director, and that was very true. There were bookshelves in the hallways, and there were often bookshelves in people's closets. And, you know, if you said, “I have 125 linear feet of Blissiana memorabilia, where shall I put it?,” there wasn't an easy answer. So in 1982 under Giles Constable, it was decided that everything sort of pre-1940, the date of the Blisses’ gift of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, would be sent to Harvard which was willing to accept it to establish the Bliss Papers, and that was done. And everything 1940 and after would remain at Dumbarton Oaks. But as I've said, not much was done with this later material until the '90s. It was in boxes and filing cabinets, and I don't think anyone much cared about these archival materials. The problem with the decision was that there is now a segregation: there is a sort of Bliss family, residential pre-1940 group and a Dumbarton Oaks institutional, post-1940 group of documents. So, there is a segregation. But, there is in fact a seamless continuity between these two groups of documents, and anyone who is researching the origin or the early years of Dumbarton Oaks has to use the Bliss Papers at Harvard to get the complete picture. So, it's a little inconvenient. On the other hand, Harvard is a wonderful caretaker and curatorial manager of such things and they're in perfect storage conditions and housings. Although I personally would like to have the Bliss Papers closer to hand, but I don’t think they need to be sent back here. I'm not going to compare them to the Elgin Marbles, because I don't think we would have lost this material, but they're at Harvard and well cared for in a way that perhaps historically Dumbarton Oaks wouldn't have had the physical space or the staff to look after them.

AS: After the Archives, you've had the opportunity to work on a number of publications, lots of cataloging projects. Can you talk a little bit about some of the most memorable projects?

JNC: Yes. I started using the Bliss Papers in order to complete the dossier files for the House Collection, learning, as I just explained, that many of the pre-1940 documents were at Harvard. And since many of the objects that the Blisses acquired that are now at Dumbarton Oaks were acquired before 1940 – in fact the vast majority of them were – much of their dealer correspondence and any other kind of ephemeral reference to an object that might be in the House Collection would be at Harvard rather than here. So, I was able periodically – usually yearly – to get a small budget line item to go to Cambridge and sit in the Archives for a week or so and just call up box after box after box of correspondence and either key-enter it into my laptop or get a Xerox of it and enter it into the dossier system. And that really allowed me to get a much better understanding of where the Blisses came by their Renaissance, Baroque, Western Medieval, Asian, and other collections, the documents for which didn't end up in the Byzantine Collection department because they weren't relevant. As you can imagine, for one good document you read five hundred that are very interesting but aren't relevant, so I also knew to a large degree what else was going on in the Bliss Papers, and I soon realized that there was a player out there in the Blisses' life, Royall Tyler, who was just absolutely instrumental in forming the Blisses’– that is the Dumbarton Oaks Collection. I mean, but for Royall Tyler, I think the collection as we know it today would not exist. And as it happens, the Royall Tyler Papers are also at the Harvard Archives. These are a long series of correspondence between 1902 and 1952 mostly from Royall Tyler to Mildred Bliss. And when I was asked to do some catalog entries and essays for an exhibition in Athens, Georgia – when Byzantine objects and American paintings from the House Collection were asked to go on loan there – I alerted Rob Nelson, then at the University of Chicago, now at Yale University – who had been asked to do the Byzantine Collection essay for that catalog – that he should look at both the Royall Tyler Papers and the Bliss Papers at Harvard. And he did, and it opened his eyes as it had mine, and so we then began to think about how useful this correspondence would be if it could be transcribed, annotated, and published in whatever format – hard copy or perhaps electronically, or both. And so, we wrote up a proposal, and the project was put into the works. And so, now when I go to Harvard, I'm also looking at the Bliss-Tyler correspondence. The correspondence starts in 1902 and ends roughly in 1953, the time of the death of Royall Tyler, and I'm through '35 on it. The '30s is the most voluminous part of the correspondence run, and '35-'39 is still a sizable chunk, but in the '40s and early '50s it drops off, so I'm about eighty percent done with the transcription. I've written an introductory essay to what will be the first chapter, and I've annotated the letters from that first chapter. I'm hoping soon to do the second chapter, and Rob is working on the '20s and '30s material – he's working on the '20s material now. And when the '30s’ correspondence is transcribed, that will chronicle the meaty, Byzantine-centric part of their buying and corresponding. So, we hope in a year and a half time, if that's not too ambitious, to have this at least in a good draft form. It's going to be huge – that's the unfortunate part of it. It's – if you publish every letter, which I think we should, even the ones that say “Thank you very much, it was a delicious meal,” and they occasionally do that, although these are intellectual people who take some time to write what they want the other person to know about life as they see it and art as they know it. I think if we publish it all, it's going to be very lengthy. If it's in hard copy format, it would certainly be two or more volumes, and there's cost implications there. If we publish it electronically, it'll be very usable by people in the future no matter how it ends up, because you can search it – if the spelling is correct, hopefully it will be. And, for example, I was talking with Gudrun – I don't know how anecdotal you want this interview to be, we can scrap this at the end if you like – who was interested in why the Blisses never acquired significant enamels, Byzantine enamels. And I said, “Oh well, you know, they really wanted to and they wrote to Tyler and Tyler to them about getting a significant enamel,” and she said, “Oh, that's very interesting. I'd always wondered if they just didn't like enamels or what.” And I said, “You know, once this document is done, you'll be able to, even in a Word format, type in the word enamel and just graze through their correspondence finding every time the world enamel is mentioned. It'll just be easy to sate your curiosity as to what the Blisses were doing with enamels, or icons, or manuscripts, or Stravinsky, for that matter. It's just going to be much easier to do research on the Blisses, if anyone is interested to do that. So, those were my two primary uses of the Harvard Archives, for the House Collection dossier files and this Bliss-Tyler project. And, in the interim, every time I've found something of interest to me about the Blisses or about Dumbarton Oaks, I've typed it in a document, a so-called chronology, called “master chronology,” that is easily three hundred pages long now in Word format, and is just date, line item, and the source, taken both from primary materials such as the correspondence and secondary materials that tell the life of the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks.

EG: Is that something you intend on publishing someday?

JNC: I don't at the moment, although I think a history of Dumbarton Oaks is long overdue. Certainly this chronology will remain at Dumbarton Oaks, and it can be migrated to whatever technology is used in the future.

EG: So, in terms of your role as the manager of the House Collection, could you speak a little bit about what your impressions were of the Blisses' mission in collecting the House Collection and about their acquisitions there?

JNC: Yes. If I could answer it slightly differently, I would say that when I came as a Junior Fellow to Dumbarton Oaks and long thereafter when I talked to people at Dumbarton Oaks or colleagues at Dumbarton Oaks I always had the strong impression that the Blisses collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art and rare landscape books and sometimes botanical prints and manuscripts, and that they had a focus of collecting that brought about the collections as they were then displayed. And then they had some household furnishings and some paintings and sculptures, but in a sense just as they had clothing and a wine cellar: these were part of the comme-il-faut nature of being a wealthy resident. Since I have taken on a curatorial role as House Collection manager, I realize that the Blisses were considerably broad in their collecting interests. And we tried to make this point in our first special exhibition, “The Collector's Microbe,” where we talked about how the Blisses not only collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, but also Asian and American and this, that, and the other. And I see my role as House Collection manager not only as a true curatorial position to protect and catalogue the collection as it has come down, but also as an advocacy position to make sure that the Blisses' vision for Dumbarton Oaks, in terms of art, isn't interpreted in as narrow a way as I understood it initially and I think others have understood it. And this is proven, I think, much beyond a shadow of a doubt, when you look at what they collected in the '37 through 1940 period when they knew that they were gifting the property and its collections to Harvard. That's when they bought a Degas and a Riemenschneider and a Rouault and other great paintings and sculptures knowing that they weren't going to ever really live with them, but believing that this “home of the humanities,” the famous phrase that Mildred Bliss uses in the preamble to her will and testament and was used other times in her correspondence, needed to have these great things; that great art inspired great conversation which inspired great research. And the same was true with music. There is absolutely no reason to continue musical offerings at Dumbarton Oaks in a Harvard institutional fellowship arena, because it wasn’t a music research institution. But the Blisses were adamant about that and really hoped Harvard would find the wherewithal to continue some kind of musical programming. And the Friends of Music series, which was inaugurated in 1946, was the result of that. All this they saw as being for the Fellows. The music was for the Fellows. The art was for the Fellows. The garden was for the Fellows. Yes, they eventually were opened to the greater and broader public, but that isn't the Blisses’ initial interest. The uniqueness that we talked about earlier in the Blisses' vision was that this was for scholarship and fellowship enrichment. So, I see that also as part of my job description to try to make the House Collection a little bit more integral to the institutional wealth.

JNSL: What is the most exciting project that you have been a part of in your time at Dumbarton Oaks, of all these wonderful things, the one closest to your heart that brings back the happiest memories?

JNC: Had you not qualified your statement at the end, I'd have given you a couple. But, the most exciting event – clearly and without a doubt – was the planning for and all of the activities that ensued with the building of the new library and the renovation and rehabilitation of the Main House, including the Music Room. This would be the thing that is dearest to my heart and that makes me the happiest. But the whole renovation will stand out in my memory after I leave here as being my most important contribution. That said, it was arduous and it was painful and it was time consuming and often laborious, and I often thought I never, ever wanted to do that sort of thing again. There are the seemingly never-ending meetings over minutia on plans and the inevitable problems that come up when you're planning for new architecture and the renovation of historically significant architecture. But, it really was terrific; I learned enormously from it. I had great colleagues and superiors – Mike Steen, certainly, who was project manager on a consulting basis, and certainly the director Ned Keenan – and working with great architects, I really loved that. The renovation of the Music Room ceiling is probably my fondest part of the project, especially because the results were, to my mind, so stellar, and I worked with great people on that project as well. But the removal of a world class collection from its housing, the incredible amount of detail work of making sure you knew every object's condition and crate housing and shelf storage housing and this and that and then bringing it all back and making new mounts and new vitrines and designing all of that in the interim before it comes back…. Again, I never want to do it again, and probably won't have to, but those are once-in-a-lifetime curatorial opportunities that would probably be distasteful to many who are not curators, but I think are just the meat of what you do when you're in charge of a great collection.

AS: If we could go back a little bit to your curatorship of the House Collection, to what extent have acquisitions been active after the Bliss days?

JNC: The House Collection is not an actively acquiring collection. That said, we do still acquire, although not in the way or to the degree that the Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or rare book collections from the library might collect. They would want to collect great examples of their particular genres, if they can be acquired legally on the marketplace. That is their mission. Their collections are not necessarily static as they were deposited by the Blisses. The House Collection, on the other hand, is. What remains from the House Collection is a kind of finite collection of Blissiana material, some of which was sold off to increase revenue for collecting in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian. We don't do that any longer, but we do acquire for the House Collection occasionally. We acquire furnishings when things wear out, especially Middle Eastern carpets. We also – although we haven't done much of this in my tenure – we also buy Blissiana material, if it's relevant. We would certainly try to buy any portraits of the Blisses that came onto the market. And they had their portraits made many times – Mildred Bliss, in particular – but they didn't choose to retain them. The one painting of Mildred Bliss that hangs over the fireplace in the Refectory they actually gave away to a friend, who later gave it back to Dumbarton Oaks. If there was some significant object that the Blisses had owned that had left Dumbarton Oaks, we might try to get it back if it was relevant to us. There have been pieces that have come up for auction – furniture in particular – that we know the Blisses owned that we haven't tried for. We just don't need it.

JNSL: Was anything ever stolen? Was there ever any – as far as you know, were there any issues with that?

JNC: There have been a few thefts, particularly of things in the gardens. The Pan figure that sits in an arched bricked area pointing towards the Acadian pool that's called Lovers Lane Pool was stolen twice and returned once and not recovered the second time. The artist who did that sculpture was Francis Sedgwick. A cast of it had been acquired or given to his daughter, and she still had it. So, after much convincing and effort, the daughter agreed to make a new mold from her sculpture from which our Pan was recast. One of the eighteenth-century putti riding dolphins that are in the Fountain Terrace was stolen, also twice, once recovered, and once not. And fortunately they are an exact pair – they're not bilaterally symmetrical, as bookends are, they're literally the same object cast twice, so we made a cast of the existing one. There are two in the garden, and one of them is modern, cast from the other, which is the original. Smaller things have been stolen, but theft has been minimal.

EG: So, could you tell us a little bit about the interaction with the House Collections with the Fellows and the scholars and if that's changed over time?

JNC: I don't know if it's changed over time in the sense of predating my arrival here, because I don't really know what happened vis-à-vis the Fellows and the House Collection. When I first came, we used to do an orientation for the Fellows, which is still done, but that orientation also included a tour through the house and especially the areas where there was significant architecture and interiors or significant House Collection objects that might be of interest to the Fellows. They also had a tour with the Byzantine curators of the Byzantine Collection and they had a tour with the Pre-Columbian curators of the Pre-Columbian Collection. The House Collection tour got dropped after five years or so, I don't quite remember, because the schedule of what the Fellows did upon arrival just became somewhat onerous and the House Collection was expendable. So, we've never done that again except by request. And certainly when we reopened, there were a number of requests that I take people through the house and show them what happened during the renovation, and this involved taking both the docents and the Fellows. Also, occasionally, Fellows are interested in House Collection objects, especially the western medieval ones, and so of course they come to my office and, like any reader, they sit and read the dossier files and look at the historic photographs and so forth, but that's somewhat unusual. And every now and then someone is interested in the Blisses so they come and ask questions.

EG: Is that also true of the Archives? – interest in the Archives?

JNC: I have a lot of interest in the Archives from the studies programs, especially the directors. They change fairly frequently, as you know, sometimes every five years, sometimes every ten years, so they often, depending on their interests and the way they want to define their ongoing or upcoming projects – they want to see what's happened. Sometimes they have that material in their offices, but frankly a lot of the historical material is in the Archives, so they check out what they need. Also, by chance, I have a number of scholarly files that relate to research or projects that were given to Dumbarton Oaks by, especially, Byzantine scholars, although in one case by a Pre-Columbian scholar, and when Fellows are working on similar topics, they come and use these materials. However, I've had about ten Fellows in the twenty years that I've been here do that, so that's not a huge number.

EG: Is there much relationship between the House Collection and the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections in terms of organization and exhibition?

JNC: Yes and no. The three Collections are all part of the same department, which is the Museum department. There's a little bit more of a sophisticated curatorial apparatus for the two primary collections, Byzantine and Pre-Columbian, less so for the House Collection, but we meet sort of on equal grounds otherwise. The exhibition space, so-called, for the House Collection is the Music Room, and it is by plan and tradition a different type of exhibition space than the gallery type of space that the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections use. We have decided to retain a kind of residential, Edwardian, Kunstkammer look for the Music Room – no wall labels, no vitrines. Yes there are spot lights and there are a few museum fittings, but they are meant to be discrete. The only – I'm not quite sure how to answer your question, that's why I said yes and no. So, let me end by saying the new thing that we've done recently since the Collections were reinstalled is to bring collecting at Dumbarton Oaks and the Museum Collections at Dumbarton Oaks into something of a unified focus. And the Bliss Gallery – which was inaugurated with that reinstallation – has a vitrine which, as of tomorrow, will have an inaugural exhibit of animal bronzes, which come from at least two of the Collections. We had wanted them to come from all three of the Collections and they could have, but the Pre-Columbians needed their very few animal bronze sculptures for the permanent installation. We will probably do a hard stone exhibition there at some time, which will be House Collection Asian, House Collection European, Byzantine, and Pre-Columbian, in order to show that the Blisses were interested in artworks made of hard stone from many cultures, and that way refocus attention on their collecting and collecting interests rather than on the cultural nature of the collection. And that certainly was true, as I said a moment ago, with the inaugural special exhibition – hallway exhibition – titled “Collector's Microbe,” which put objects from all three Collections into the same vitrines and onto the same walls in order to show that this was a Dumbarton Oaks collection in the singular, our literal and legal title – we are the Dumbarton Oaks Research Institute and Collection “singular,” and I think that use of the singular was purposeful – I think that was by choice.

EG: Other than the creation of the Bliss Gallery, the House Collection has always been housed in the Music Room?

JNC: Housed, in a public sense, in the Music Room. Housed, in an institutional sense, throughout the building, so the paintings and furnishings that you see on the first floor – what we call the first floor gallery, the hallway between the museum wing and the Founders Room, for example – the paintings in the Founders Room and so forth, these are all House Collection items, including the Founders Room itself, the boiseries, the wall paneling of the Founders Room – these are all accessioned House Collection items. They are now actually on public display to a degree because we've just started running docent tours on Saturday by sign-up appointment, but that's a very new and historically unique moment in our public persona. But, we've always had House Collection objects used the way the Blisses wanted them to be seen and that is as beautiful things to delight, inspire perhaps, staff and Fellows and scholars. So, there's a public space and a private space, and there's a big storage space where a number of things don't see the light of day at the moment, because there's no room for them.

JNSL: Are you aware of any attempts either in the immediate past or the more distant past to take some of the stories associated with Dumbarton Oaks and its history and turn them into any kind of dramatic or sort of novelistic element? Has anyone ever shown an interest in doing that, because when I listen to these stories I think sometimes it sounds like it would make a great movie, or make a great play, or make a great story?

JNC: I've never heard of such a thing. I do think that a history of the institution needs to be written.

JNSL: That's something that several people whom I've interviewed have said.

JNC: And I think through the Oral History interview project and through the archival holdings, both the Bliss Papers at Harvard and the ones that we've now talked quite a bit about, it’s all there. One might identify additional people to interview once one started writing a history, as always is the case with biographies or institutional histories. But easily eighty percent of it is already there, it just needs the time and the interest.

EG: So, have you noticed any significant changes over the time that you've been here since your undergraduate ‘til the present, in terms of the academic or social or even physical setting here at Dumbarton Oaks?

JNC: Let me start with the physical setting. The physical setting was in need of renovation by the time that Giles Constable became director. He pointed that out in the interview that I did with him, and he wrote about it in his biannual report several times. He points out that well-made buildings are not like the buildings that he or I, as he put it in his interview, might buy because we can't afford to buy better-made buildings. We have to replace the roof every twenty years, whereas roofs on better-made buildings last for fifty years in all respects. But when he came to Dumbarton Oaks, the fifty year time bomb was about to explode. And it was absolutely true – the infrastructure of the physical real estate of Dumbarton Oaks was in dire need of renovation. And he was the one that reinforced the third floor – the attic floor, which is now used for the publications office space – in order to house shelving for the Byzantine library, and in Thomson's tenure, the courtyard gallery was built and all of that space underneath which had been just dirt was excavated to form a connection between the basement of the Garden Library and the Pre-Columbian Collection and underneath the Music Room, which allowed for offices and shelving and storage space and so forth. So, the physical plant improved fairly steadily. Air conditioning was added in the Constable era, and the physical plant continued to improve steadily in the years that I knew the institution. It improved dramatically in the '90s and at the turn of the century with the acquisition of new real estate: the director's house and the apartment building La Quercia, which took a certain amount of pressure off of the existing real estate, including some questionable legal pressures: the old director's house, now the Refectory, probably could not have housed a family of more than two people because using the upper floor as a bedroom space might have been considered illegal from a life-safety aspect. There were reasons to move on and certainly in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the decade we're in, the building of considerable new physical space – the library, the gardeners’ court – and the renovation of the existing physical spaces was a remarkable change. That's the easy answer. Socially, I don't know. I was in my twenties when I was a Junior Fellow, and the parties and the swimming pools activities and going into Georgetown for impromptu, on-the-cheap dinners and beers was great fun. Do Fellows still do this today? Probably. I think when you interview some of the younger Fellows or staff, that's an interesting question to ask. I see Fellows being very serious here. They're very nice and when I interact with them on a social level I always enjoy that, but I see them being very serious, and I have a feeling that was always the case. That hasn't changed, but possibly the pressures of the world and the paucity of job openings in academic humanistic professions and just the need to spend your money wisely and move on and get your research and your dissertation done or your next book done and so forth leaves you little time to have a beer and a pizza. I don't know. You had a third prong on that question?

EG: Academically.

JNC: Academically. Oh, the standards here have always been very high, remarkably high I think, in everything – the choice of people that come. I know that sounds slightly self-serving, so forgive me. But the publications, the programs and projects that the institution has sponsored – I mean, Dumbarton Oaks has a stellar record, and I don't say that because I'm “in-house.” I think I could write a critical review if I had to, but you know, you look at the history of what this institution has done in the world and here in its self-appointed research areas or interest areas, and it's just remarkable, it's remarkable.

AS: Has the evolution of the faculty to speak of here at Dumbarton Oaks changed the academics?

JNC: The Blisses and the early administrators wanted some kind of faculty presence, a kind of senior mentorship, I believe from what I've read. Let me back up to say that I think the Blisses initially just wanted senior research people here. When more junior people came and were given a kind of task working half day on their dissertations and half day on putting together a census of Byzantine objects in America or, if they were text people, looking at textual references for objects. (If you haven't read David Wright's paper on the early years of the institution, I highly recommend it to you.) I think the Blisses and the administration realized that there needed to be a kind of mentorship program for the more junior people who came – that this was something that would be very valuable. And because of the Harvard association, a kind of academic model was first chosen where there would be professors. But, it didn't make a great deal of sense because they didn't have students and they didn't give classes, per se. I mean, they might offer seminars maybe or give occasional lectures, but they didn't – it just wasn't a good model. And if they became tenured – initially a few of them did – what did they see their role to be? Did they see their role to be tenured faculty who fortunately didn't have to teach so they could spend one hundred percent of their time doing research, or just what? And so it was hard, it was a very hard model to keep going, and I think they were right in doing away with it, and in providing academic leadership and academic mentorship in other ways through having a coterie of like beings of all stages of life physically in one space. As is true now with the symposia and catalogue projects and the coin and seal seminars that are run in the summer, people with similar interests can come from different institutions and talk together, talk to senior members, talk to junior members. Dumbarton Oaks facilitates that, makes the bread and butter of that happen. It would only happen otherwise through email or through something much less interactive.

EG: So, sort of in closing, could you talk a little how you see the role of the Archives and the House Collection in the future?

JNC: The Archives should be exactly what it is today, only better. It should have every significant bit of Dumbarton Oaks institutional, intellectual history that's pertinent to the institution, housed there. It should be user-friendly, it should be – in a conservation sense – secure and well maintained. If we ever enter into an economic period and a digital period where things like that can be more easily accessible through digital technology, then that should happen. It happens obviously to a degree because everything you're doing will eventually become, if it hasn't already, part of the Archives and this comes in digital format, so the transition is underway. The House Collection should also carry on as it is, should maintain its course, ensuring that its role in both the Blisses' lives and in the institutional life of Dumbarton Oaks should not be forgotten. Its status should be maintained and honored because many of the art objects – by no means all, but a good many – are museum, world-class pieces that show a great level of connoisseurship and interest by the founders of this institution. Maintenance of this Collection should be insured, because it isn't inexpensive to maintain an art collection. But Dumbarton Oaks has and, I hope, will continue to do so. And I think that it should. In bad economic times, or when the world has moved on, one has to make choices, and it's possible that things will change, but for the moment I think we should stay the course for both the Archives and the House Collection.

Exhibition-making starts with an idea around selected objects rather than with a fixed display plan. In the case of All Sides Considered, which was developed with the intention to highlight and exemplify the research of objects in our Maya collection, we were interested in exploring the many layers of each selected object or case study – the material specifics and cultural signifiers studied by archaeologists, art historians, scientists, and anthropologists. To bring the scholarly and scientific analyses into the display, expansive label text was of the essence; yet, so as not to distract from the aesthetic value of the objects, a display setting had to be created that would be able to bring these two sides into play and keep them in balance.

The solution we came up with was this: approaching the gallery from the museum entrance, the visitor perceives mainly the colorful accentuated pedestals carrying the highlighted objects. Text and further interpretative material comes into sight only after the interested viewer has entered the area. In general, our interest in experimenting with settings is a crucial aspect of the museum’s exhibition program to activate the relationship between art, art scholarship, and visitors.

It was important to place the objects in prime locations within the narrow gallery. Set in cases that are positioned perpendicular to the walls, the artifacts are accessible from all sides. At the same time, the placement prescribes a passageway through the display; the visitor walks right up to the artifacts and then is gently forced to ‘slalom’ around them.

Each case study is equipped with a stool that resembles not unintentionally a lab stool. It invites the visitor to linger and engage with each object and the rather text-heavy information, which includes ‘hands-on’ items, slide shows, and a movie clip.

Hillary Olcott, Museum Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator

What are some new elements that you incorporated into the display?

One of the novel things about All Sides Considered is the interactive nature of the displays. Incorporating the interactive elements into the labels presented several challenges to the museum team. The most difficult elements to incorporate were the iPads. The challenge arose during the design phase of exhibition planning. We needed to come up with a way to incorporate seamlessly the iPads into the labels so that visitors would feel as though they were interacting with the exhibition itself, not with iPads. It was also imperative that the design allowed visitors to use the touchscreens without access to any of the buttons. While we did not want visitors turning the iPads on and off, we needed a display that allowed the museum staff to do so. Similarly, we needed a design that securely held the iPads but made it easy to remove them when maintenance was needed. After many hours of brainstorming and several prototypes, we came up with a successful design. However, it was not until the displays were installed, the labels applied, and the iPads running that we all breathed a collective sigh of relief and stepped back to admire our work. Although the iPads require some maintenance, they are an absolute success. They allow visitors to touch, hear, and explore the Dumbarton Oaks Collection like never before. I look forward to dreaming up new ways to use this exciting technology!

Miriam Doutriaux, Pre-Columbian Collection Exhibition Associate

How does the exhibit reflect the current state of/trends in Maya scholarship?

The exhibit showcases several exceptional Maya objects from the Dumbarton Oaks collection that were carefully reexamined by experts over the past three years. It focuses on the objects and the science behind the recent Dumbarton Oaks publication Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks. Six case-studies outline recent findings about the Maya, and illustrate some of the epistemological underpinnings of current Maya research.

Much knowledge about the Maya is derived from iconographic analyses, as evidenced in the comparative dating of 2,000-year-old etchings on a greenstone pendant. Careful observation and informed comparison with other objects often leads to new findings, including the discovery that four carved spheres in the Dumbarton Oaks collection are the earliest known Maya bone bells.

For example, experts in the fields of geology, mineralogy, conchology, biology, and physical anthropology contributed scientific opinions and analyses – from radiocarbon dating to X-ray diffraction analysis – to the study of a Maya mosaic mask. New technologies are also helping scholars to better visualize and experience the objects they study. A 3-D digital model revealed subtly carved features on a Maya stela, and X-rays exposed the production process of a rattle bowl with a hollow base.

Mayanists also rely on experimental archaeology to refine their understanding of ancient practices and production techniques. A carving station in the exhibit allows visitors to experiment with tool types used by ancient Maya carvers.

The exhibit is about the scholarly research process – the slow, painstaking work that underlies groundbreaking discoveries about the Maya. As museum visitors listen to a rattle bowl, flip through x-ray images, examine a 3-D digital model, and compare images or specimens, they are taking a scholar’s approach – and perhaps gaining a new appreciation of the thrills of Maya scholarship.

Chris Harrison, Senior Exhibitions Technician

Watch this video, in which Chris describes the workstation designed to allow visitors to experiment with tool types used by ancient Maya carvers.

]]>No publisherMayaDumbarton Oaks MuseumPre-Columbian CollectionSpecial ExhibitionExhibitionMuseum2012/11/07 15:40:00 GMT-4News ItemJeffrey Quilter http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/jeffrey-quilter
Oral History Interview with Jeffrey Quilter, undertaken by Anne Bonnell-Freidin and Clem Wood at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University on August 13, 2008. At Dumbarton Oaks, Jeff Quilter was the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies and Curator of the Pre-Columbian Collection (1995–2005). ABF: We are Anna Bonnell-Freidin and Clem Wood, here on August 13th in the Peabody Museum at Harvard University with Professor Jeffrey Quilter to talk about his impressions and time at Dumbarton Oaks. So we’d like to begin by asking you how you first came to Dumbarton Oaks and what your initial impressions were of the scholarly and social atmosphere of the community.

JQ: I first came to Dumbarton Oaks – the very first time I came when I lived in Washington, D.C., in the late ’70s, and I came as a casual visitor. Of course, that’s very different than later when I came as a scholar attending the annual symposia, which I did for many years. And then in 1994 I applied for the directorship and was asked to come. So, I started being involved in spring 1995, when I accepted the job, and came to meet people and so forth. And Dumbarton Oaks is well-known by many people, especially scholars. It is interesting that in all three fields, it is common for scholars in each field to think that Dumbarton Oaks only does what they’re interested in. So, Byzantinists think that it’s only Byzantine Studies, pre-Columbianists think it’s only Pre-Columbian Studies, and many of the Garden folks think the same. I knew enough to know that wasn’t true even when I applied. And I knew it was a wonderful place in terms of its beauty and its historic presence, and I knew that the people who went there were bright and enthusiastic, and of course what impressed me was how bright and enthusiastic the staff was as well, and the community, not just of scholars, but the community of people who worked there. So, I was in seventh heaven. I came from a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. I’m a native New Yorker, but I had been teaching for fifteen years at Ripon College in Wisconsin. And even though there was no tenure, and it was a limited-tenure term as Director of Studies, it was a chance not to be missed, to be involved with that community. So, it was great, and it lived up to my expectations, if not exceeded them, in terms of the – it’s an interesting mix of a quiet, scholarly retreat in many ways and at the same time being a very dynamic place filled with people with interesting projects, interesting ideas, and very much engaged in their research.

CW: So how did you find the transition to not having students around as you had in the liberal arts college environment, being at Dumbarton Oaks?

JQ: Well, you do have students around. As Director of Studies, you have graduate students, of course. They’re not your graduate students; they are someone else’s. In a way that’s – there are advantages and disadvantages of that situation. I mostly found it advantageous. One can take an avuncular role, and I guess it’s in my nature to do so, so that you can be involved with their projects, you can counsel them on career choices or using the right computer equipment – though usually the younger people tell the older people about that – and be involved with them and have a nice long time – a year usually – to do that. And yet you don’t have – like an uncle, you know, you have the joy of interacting but not the weight of responsibility should they run afoul of their plans or projects. But most of them, of course, don’t. So, I found it fine. And after teaching for fifteen years in an undergraduate setting, that was plenty. And it was nice to have a change.

ABF: And what were the most important relationships for you?

JQ: Well, the relationships of course are different because – I guess it’s true for anybody in any position anywhere – you have different kinds of relationships with different people. So with the Junior Fellows in particular, which is the people to whom I was referring just now, you have that avuncular relationship. With the regular Fellows, who are usually peers or older scholars, distinguished scholars sometimes – one might argue whether they’re peers or not, I guess – the relationship can vary from somewhat formal to collegial to friends, depending. And I made a lot of friends, of course, there. So, that’s one set of relationships, the sort of scholarly relationships. The relationships with the staff are a different kind of relationship: more long-term, because the Fellows come and the Fellows go, but the staff basically stays the same over much longer periods of time. And so, there’re different kinds of dynamics going on. But I think everybody I met at Dumbarton Oaks was – whether they were Fellows there on short term or staff on long term – realized that they were privileged to be in this wonderful place, which had such great support and such great resources. So that it was a happy place, all in all, although, you know, there are always issues, as there is in any institution or any small community. Did that answer your question, or were you looking for something else?

ABF: I suppose that answers it, unless there are any specific relationships that –

JQ: Ah. Well, I found, of course, working with the Pre-Columbian staff was particularly important to me, and when I was at Dumbarton – and at least in my first years at Dumbarton Oak – the organizational structure was different, so that each Director of study basically had their own little fiefdom, if you will. And so Bridget Gazzo, for example, who was the librarian for Pre-Columbian, reported to me at the time, and I especially enjoyed working with Bridget. She’s a great person, very enthusiastic, very knowledgeable as well. And there was a woman named Carol Callaway who was the Assistant Curator at the time and who I was close to – unfortunately died my second year, which was rough on everyone. I enjoyed working particularly with Landscape Studies Directors. I was friendly with Alice-Mary and we had a great working relationship. I think that because Landscape and Pre-Columbian are the Junior Programs, though there was a kind of natural affinity there in some ways. And in particular I developed a very close friendship with Michel Conan, who was Director of Landscape Studies a few years after I arrived and stayed on after I left for a while – so, those in particular. I enjoyed working very much with Angeliki Laiou, the first Director who – we had a few rough spots, I guess, in understanding how each other worked, and that’s true for, I guess, everyone. But I think I was particularly engaged with those folks. Don Pumphrey’s another one, Hector in the kitchen, Carlos, house staff, were all just great folks.

CW: So it sounds as if you were very in touch with the other disciplines when you were there. And would you say that generally in your time there was a lot of contact between the three scholarly programs, or maybe you were referring more to kind of informal relationships?

JQ: Well, my understanding of Dumbarton Oaks and the relationships between the programs before I arrived is as historically based as yours, which is to say, I only know what people tell me, or what I’ve heard. There’s no sort of source to go to. And we all know the vagaries of history anyhow, in terms of trying to understand what happened in the past. It was my impression – and I think there was plenty of supporting evidence in all sorts of ways – that the three programs had been fairly separate entities in many ways, and to some degree there was a certain amount of tension between and jealousies between the different programs. Between the different – you know, the Byzantines got more Fellows than the other two programs. There were all sorts of little traditions that got developed. For example, I had a little fund that allowed me to have a party for local-area scholars once a year, at the beginning of the academic year, that neither of the other two programs had. It was just some mini-tradition that Pre-Columbian Studies got that the others didn’t get. And I eventually stopped having it, because it sort of became irrelevant at some point. They were fine, but the Fellows got to meet these people anyhow. And it became very clear that one of the – there were a few big issues. One, of course, is money and resources in terms of Fellows and how big a symposium you can have versus the other folks. And then there were issues on space. And everybody, everybody was crowded in terms of space, because books were stacked just everywhere. My attitude – I remember having a meeting with Angeliki at one point and saying something to the effect that, you know, Benjamin Franklin said during the Revolution that if we don’t hang together, surely we’ll all hang separately. And my attitude was that I found what the other programs did interesting. I didn’t find every Byzantine scholar interesting, of course. I didn’t find every Pre-Columbian scholar interesting. When I was about your ages, I took classes in medieval art history with Herb Kessler at Chicago when he was there very briefly. My background – my mother was English – I visited castles, I was very interested in the Middle Ages as a youth and I still have that interest. We do get Ph.D.s or Doctorates of Philosophy, we’re supposed to have a general, broad base from which we pursue our particular studies, and I thought having these three rather odd, peculiar programs all cheek by jowl was great. And that it offered opportunities for me personally to learn all these interesting things that were going on in these other fields. So, I hoped to find ways to bridge gaps and bridge these differences by reaching out to the other folks. Do you want to turn off the air conditioner? Let’s see, I think if I just crank it up hot enough. We are now in the twenty-first century, we have things called air conditioners. Is it getting warmer? It’ll actually go up. We’ll make it super hot.

ABF: 80, nice.

JQ: By the time it gets to 80 we won’t want to do this anymore, right?

ABF: So, would you say that you came in with a set of goals when you became Director of Studies?

JQ: Well, to tell you the truth, I was pretty overwhelmed at getting the job offer. I was delighted. I felt a great sense of responsibility to have the opportunity to do this because Dumbarton Oaks then, and I hope still now – you know, the publications that came out of Pre-Columbian Studies and the symposia that it held are not quite universally, but among the top-ranked scholars in the field, these are important events, these are important publications. It is a place of note, it is a leader, and what it does is significant, so to have the opportunity to play a leadership role in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, I felt was an extremely great honor and an extremely great responsibility. So that in terms of my having goals, especially to be truthful – now that I’m not there any more I can be totally truthful – I would say that I didn’t come in with clear goals of change. I wanted to continue the tradition that I saw established and appreciated, that Betty Benson and Elizabeth Boone had – the foundations that they had laid. I wanted to maintain them. I think also as a general principle that people who wind up in positions of leadership of institutions, of programs, of departments – and it’s true well beyond academics as well – they often want to do something new. They want to put their own stamp on things. But the hardest thing to learn to do is to leave well enough alone. You know, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And I wanted to be very cautious that I didn’t follow that path of trying to do something just for the sake of doing something when I thought that the program at D.O. worked very well. I thought it’s – obviously there were issues about, you know, “May I have more, please, sir?” There were opportunities to have more resources. One always likes to do more of the same, but not to radically change its character and move in some very different direction, when I thought that what was being done was the right thing to do in the first place. As I grew into the job, I did start to see things that I wanted to do because at the same time that you don’t want to change things for the sake of changing things, when you have the opportunity to mold something, to just let a ship go or a car go without any steering, without any direction to it, is also a waste of a valuable resource. So that maybe after my first, second year, I did start to develop some general trends that I wanted to follow. And those – I would say I had a philosophy that was as follows, which is that I wanted to maintain the general approach that Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks had, but to expand the franchise somewhat. And Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks as I understood it and still understand it is in a unique position in that it serves as a place where the ends of the spectrum – maybe not the extreme ends of the spectrum, but the ends of the spectrum of the field – can find common ground. You know, there is no such thing called Pre-Columbian Studies anywhere except at Dumbarton Oaks. I mean, these things are pursued here in the Department of Anthropology, in the Peabody Museum, in the History of Art and Architecture program. But Pre-Columbian Studies as a field or a discipline or area, realm, arena of discussion or interaction, really only exists at Dumbarton Oaks. So, by the very framing of the discourse as Pre-Columbian Studies, Dumbarton Oaks created a place and a space where art historians and field archaeologists and those who work in early colonial period on documents and those who work in remote antiquity can all – not always all at the same time, but over the long haul, over years – have a place to meet, exchange views, and interact in ways that they often don’t get to do, or at least get to do as easily, elsewhere. So that to me was a very precious thing, and that was something that I wanted to maintain. What I wanted to do that was in a – not a different direction, but have a greater emphasis on, was the definition of what “Pre-Columbian” is. Because Pre-Columbian as defined in the late ’40s and early ’50s, when Robert Bliss was beginning to think along these lines, really referred to the so-called “high cultures” of the New World, which of course are from Central Mexico through Central America to the Central Andes, and with particular emphasis on the cultures of Mexico and Central America and the Central Andes. I thought that, you know, Robert Bliss was a visionary, but he was a man of his time, and his goal was to try and demonstrate to the world that the art of pre-Columbian America was as valid and as valuable and as interesting as art anywhere, and so in some sense emphasizing the so-called “high cultures” had a point to it. I thought that fifty years later it would be advantageous to at least offer opportunities to explore commonalities and similarities between the ancient peoples of the New World in areas outside of those main, so-called “high cultures.” You know, there’s lots and lots of similarities between the ancient peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and Central Mexico. There are lots and lots of things going on in the Amazon that were directly relevant to the culture of the Inkas and their predecessors. So, I wanted to try and expand the franchise a little bit, not simply because of the theoretical reasons that I’ve just laid out, but also to offer the opportunity for scholars who were doing research on topics that were very much in harmony with the kinds of approaches that D.O. traditionally took, to have a chance to come there. For example, there are many people working on iconography and symbolism of the Mississippian cultures or the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest who were rather alone and by themselves, especially even five or ten years ago –I think it’s changed a bit now – didn’t have many people to speak to within their own fields but could find interesting conversation partners by talking to a Mesoamericanist or talking to someone who works in Peru. So, I wanted to give those people opportunities too. And I thought it was good for Dumbarton Oaks. I thought that by opening up a little bit our field, we enrich ourselves. It’s like a blood transfusion: get a little new blood in. And I’d say the third thing I tried to do was to be much more involved and pro-active in involving Latin Americans because ninety-five percent of the territory – whether it’s high culture or middle or low culture –of the ancient New World is in Latin America today. And increasingly the scholarship that is being done in Latin America is equal or sometimes better than a lot of what’s happening in North America and in Europe, and I felt that it was just – on a totally – it’s the right thing to do. We need to engage with our Latin American colleagues more. And also, frankly, on a political, realpolitik basis, I felt that in the long term it was crucial for Dumbarton Oaks and for Harvard to increasingly engage ourselves with Latin American scholars because, you know, anthropology and the kinds of studies we do are the children of imperialism and colonialism. I mean, there’s no way to get around that. It’s a fact. And we can’t erase that history; that history has happened. But we can try and do better in involving our Latin American colleagues directly with what we do rather than incidentally. So those were three things I attempted to do, and I think I was fairly successful in some ways.

ABF: Going back to something you said earlier, you mentioned that you were interested in continuing the tradition that you inherited when you became Director, so what exactly, what do you see as being that tradition?

JQ: That tradition takes a number of forms. One is, as I said, having a meeting place for scholars who approach the subject matter somewhat differently. Anthropologists, anthropological archaeologists tend to approach their subject matter from a cultural or social perspective, and they’re looking at the objects in the Dumbarton Oaks galleries in the social context. Art historians traditionally tend to look at the object and look at it outwards. So having a chance for those people too find topics, for example, for symposia, for workshops, for roundtables, where you could have this kind of mix occur – to the benefit of both, hopefully – is one of the traditions. One of the other traditions is to have those kinds of meetings. Betty Benson you know – many of the important first steps or critical steps in the cracking of the Maya code, as I’m sure Mike Coe will tell you, and as he goes over in his book – you might take a look at his book before you talk to him, Breaking the Maya Code – many of those initial steps occurred at Dumbarton Oaks – occurred with Betty Benson literally getting on the floor with other scholars and going over glyphs and working through these issues of—working on those hieroglyphs to break the Maya code. I hope that we can make similar kinds of achievements, although even coming close to that kind of achievement would be significant. So, I’d say those are the two main axes I see. One is having meetings that get the right people together and that focus on issues that are either the time is right to have a synthesis of discussion or the work has sort of reached a point where it’s the right time to have a meeting. And then being able to identify those points, or to have a meeting that pushes the discussion to that point, is one thing. And then the other one is to focus on – we – Dumbarton Oaks – I still say “we” – Dumbarton Oaks tends to focus more on the art, symbolism, religion side of the discussion than the sort of bare stones and bones approaches. So, those are the traditions.

CW: And you think that you met your goals for the most part, you said?

JQ: Well, you know, one always – maybe in scholarship we’re sort of used to always being overly critical on ourselves as well as other people, though a lot of scholars seem to mostly say it for other people. I always think of, “Gee, there are a number of things, other projects, ideas I had that I wasn’t able to do because my time was up.” I think some of those things were certainly – some of the things we did I felt were certainly heading in the right direction. One example – and you mentioned publications. There hadn’t been a major Inka symposium at Dumbarton Oaks ever. We had that in 1997, I believe it was. We did it with the top scholars in the field. As a matter of fact, we took a group photograph, and there were four scholars – John Roe, John Morra, Maria Rostworowski, and Tom Zuidema – and two of those people, John Roe and John Morra, are no longer with us, so that will be a historic photograph. And one of the organizers, Craig Morris, who was a leading scholar also, unfortunately at a very young age, is no longer with us either. And we did that symposium not only on a crucial topic, a major topic, the Inka, but also we did it with the wonderful cooperation and support from the Peruvian Embassy. So, that was fulfilling sort of two goals at once, which was working with Latin Americans and having the opportunity to do a major topic. Another one that I’m particularly pleased with is I organized with John Hoopes a symposium on southern Central America and Colombia -- “Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia” – and that symposium I think still stands for the record as having the greatest number of Latin American scholars participating that we’ve ever had before. So, that one I was very pleased with as well. And then last but not least, my last symposium was in Peru, done in conjunction with the La Católica University of Peru as well as the Rafael Larco Herrera Museum, and that was quite a feat to pull off. That was the first year that our facilities were closed because of the renovation, but it was a great opportunity to sort of take D.O. on the road and actually bring it to Latin America. So, that was a great chance again to do a major topic but working closely with Latin Americans.

CW: And then how did you find being the Curator and the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies at the same time? Did you integrate – it seems as if the relationships between the collections and the studies programs varied depending on the personalities involved at the times, but did you feel as if you particularly integrated those parts of D.O., since you held those roles at the same time?

JQ: Well, a lot has changed in terms of the way in which these things are configured and thought of. When I got to D.O., I was told quite clearly that we had a Collection. We didn’t have a museum. The galleries were only open from 2 to 5 p.m. And what’s the difference between a collection and a museum, you may ask? The difference between a collection and a museum is that a museum is an institution which is designed to have objects, artifacts, programs, to be available to the public, with specific mandates to educate, inform, provide aesthetic experience, etc. A collection is exactly that: it’s a group of objects which is not necessarily organized on the basis of anything other than itself, if you will. And the idea of making clear that we’re talking about a collection rather than a museum is that the brief hours and the way in which the collection was presented was intended to provide something for the public to see, but to maintain an emphasis that we were primarily a research institution in support of scholarship, and that our sense of commitment to the public came secondary, frankly. And I think that’s great, you know. I think that’s perfectly fine. I think that there’s all sorts of museums in Washington, D.C., all sorts of museums in any major city, and I don’t think every collection or every set of artifacts or objects should necessarily have to try and be the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian’s supported by public monies and it is obliged to serve the American public who helps keep it running. But I think having places that are designed primarily for research, I thought that was a perfectly logical idea. I think one of the things that’s happened between now and then is that at one point suddenly the Collection started being called a museum without any thought, without any discussion, as to what all that meant, what the consequences of that meant, what the obligations – and you might say, “Well, it’s just a name.” But you know, we’re scholars, we’re academics. We make our business being particular about what you call things and how you refer to things and the consequences of doing that. And I think it’s – I’m not saying it’s wrong that D.O. now calls its collections museums, but I think it was unfortunate that this change took place without any deliberated and deliberate deliberations on that whole issue and what it meant and what the options were. It was kind of done rather haphazardly and slapdash, if you ask me. So, for much of my time, being a Curator and being Director of Studies was not a major problem. Now there was constant care and attention to and interactions with the Collection. There were plenty of scholars who came to look at the collections. Not every Fellow wants to look at the collections, but there are always scholars who are coming to look at them. We also had a large-scale project for a catalogue series, and one catalogue was published just as I came into office, that catalogue was being finished, that’s the Andean catalogue, which was done by Elizabeth Boone. One of my great burdens and trials at D.O. was the catalogue projects, because – and it would take more than your tape has time to fill. It’s a long story as to why the catalogue project has been so onerous and difficult in terms of its production; but we did manage to get one volume out, which is the Olmec volume, and that was a major triumph. Unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of other volumes that should have come out that just never did, and I know there’s one that’s still being worked on, and I hope it comes out. So, I was fine with being Curator. I did have – in the old system, when the Assistant Curator reported directly to me – now you know Juan Antonio Murro, right?

CW: No.

JQ: You don’t. Well, Juan Antonio Murro is the Assistant Curator for Pre-Columbian. He reports to Gudrun. Well, I hired him because he at first reported to me. Before the reorganization, he reported to me. Prior to Juan Antonio, there was a woman named Loa Traxler, who you should also interview, by the way –

ABF: Yeah, we will.

JQ: – who reported to me and I hired. And prior to her there was this woman Carol Callaway, who I mentioned. And they – whether it was Carol, Loa, or Juan Antonio – they handled the day-to-day care and feeding, if you will, of the collection, so it was not a huge burden to me. I sort of made the executive decisions and so forth. It worked perfectly well. So it was no major problem.

ABF: Can you tell us a bit about the experience of putting together the Olmec catalogue?

JQ: Ah. Yes, I can tell you quite a bit about it; I can tell you – I told you – hours about it. Well, I guess this is for the record, so I’ll sit back and I’ll tell you. I think that the catalogue projects started before I came to D.O. It was initiated by Elizabeth Boone. My impression – I don’t know if this is a fact – my impression is that she convinced Angeliki that it was going to be a quick and dirty: “Oh, we’ll just publish some little books, you know, just little guides, user’s guides.” And while she said that, what really happened was is she went and she got some money, outside money, and produced this two-volume – show it to the camera, Jeff – and produced this elaborate, beautiful set of books on the Andean catalogue. And then she left. She left the job and she had a catalogue for southern Central America and Colombia set. She had a catalogue that’s supposed to be Maya and Olmec set to do, and she had a catalogue for Central Mexico supposedly lined up. And I got there and I said, “Well, I’m not going to publish a rinky-dink little handbook. I want to publish a catalogue that looks like this!” But the problem was that the budgeting and the timing for doing this were completely inappropriate. The budgeting, actually, was not a major problem, because Angeliki actually – when Angeliki saw these volumes, she got extremely upset. She actually said to me, she said, “I didn’t sign on to produce these big volumes. I agreed to a small publication.” And I said, “Well, I just got here. All I did was proof the color on the final proofs; that’s all. Everything else was done by Elizabeth.” So she said, “Well I –” And then she brought copies up here for the – what’s it called, the foundation, the people the Director reports to – the Fellows, Harvard Fellows, and they loved it. They just loved it: “Oh, this is wonderful, this is beautiful.” And so she came back and said, “Oh, it was great, a big success. They loved it.” So, I was given the go-ahead, basically, to continue publishing volumes in that format, but the problem was is that the scheduling was all messed up, and these things were supposed to be turned in at a much more rapid rate than was possible, which is another problem. At this point the problem lies not with anybody at Dumbarton Oaks – and this is of course a problem that is not just pertinent to these catalogues, but is a problem with all D.O. publications that I had to deal with, as well as any edited book I’ve ever had to deal with anywhere, which is that trying to get authors to produce the books or their chapters on time is extremely difficult. Because these scholars, most of whom are big names – very important, very busy – they say, “Yes, yes, yes” to ten different things, and then they only have time to do three. And if you happen to be number four on the list – you know, it doesn’t matter if there’s ten things that they said they’re going to do and you’re number four; if they can only do three, you know, I mean it’s as good as a mile: you might as well be number ten, because if the work doesn’t get done, the book doesn’t get published. So that’s the problem I faced with the catalogues. The main problem I faced had nothing to do with the directors of D.O. or anything at D.O.; it had to do with getting the authors to produce the materials on time. Their schedules were inappropriate, we extended them, they still didn’t come through, so we eventually had to cancel a few. That’s what happened. There’re chances that these things can be resurrected, perhaps, by Joanne, and I wish her a lot of luck. I mean, the one thing that I don’t miss from D.O. is – I mean, editing is a thankless job, basically. It’s an important job, and you can gain satisfaction from it, because this was an important symposium, this is going to be a landmark book, and you as an editor helped make it happen, but the amount of credit you get – you know, I believe it was Elizabeth Boone who said that editing books was like doing other people’s laundry. I think that’s absolutely right. It’s kind of a thankless job, even though everybody wants clean clothes. Although I’m still editing D.O. books here, you know. There’s still D.O. books that because I was involved with them, I’m still involved with this. I mean, it’s going to go on and on and on. I know Jan’s got the axe out, so supposedly I’m supposed to get these done fast. But that’s been a problem and it’s a headache.

CW: And you mentioned already being very aware of Robert Bliss’s legacy as a collector and of the role Betty Benson played in founding the collection, but how – I’m sure you were aware of that before coming in as director – but how did you encounter that inheritance in your role as Curator?

JQ: Well, there were many people there who still remember the Blisses. Sue Boyd knew the Blisses, Betty Benson knew the Blisses, so there the memory of them as the founding mother and father – still quite strong. Ask some of the guards and they’ll say they’ve seen them at night. If you want a really oral history, you should go ask Carlos about what they –

CW: Ghost stories?

JQ: Yeah, because there was lots of ghost stories. And of course Betty even now is still an active scholar in the field, and she came regularly to D.O. I always felt that, you know, it was my privilege to involve Betty as much as possible in the life of D.O., considering how important a figure she is in terms of her research as well as her importance in establishing the program. So, that certainly was the way I felt their presence, both in terms of conscious memory of – there were some folks who passed away while I was there too who also knew the Blisses. As well as the vision of having that beautiful Philip Johnson – you know, the Philip Johnson gallery has problems from a modern curatorial standard, but it’s still a magical place when all is said and done.

ABF: What are the problems as you see them?

JQ: Well, the main problem is light. Now, that’s been remedied, I believe, by the new glass that’s been installed. But Johnson wanted to have as much natural light and as much greenery as a backdrop to these pre-Columbian objects, and visually, it’s spectacular. The main problem is that most galleries, especially for things like showing textiles or for things that are subject to damage by sunlight, you can’t let all that light in. It’s like showing Rembrandt prints with a big searchlight on them or something. But that, I believe, has been remedied by the glass, or at least modified. The other problem it had, of course, is roofs. The roof leaked, which I suppose has also been fixed. Philip Johnson is famous – a lot of architects are famous – for beautiful buildings, but engineering – they’re disasters, like Fallingwater. So, the roof leaked a lot, and it was a big problem, but it’s still a wonderful building. And it is to be hoped that the leaking problem and the light problem have been at least ameliorated.

CW: I think Betty Benson told a story of going through the Gallery when it was being built and noticing that the acoustics were really bad, and Philip Johnson was there and he waved her off and said, “No, no, it’s fine, it’s fine; it’s not a problem.” And she said, “Well, yes, but you don’t have to give lectures in here.”

JQ: Yeah, you mean the echo problem?

CW: Right.

JQ: Which, of course, most school kids or even older people, when they come, that’s the first thing – the thing they remember is standing and getting that weird echo effect, you know, where your voice travels and so forth. But the other interesting thing about that is, as I remember, that Philip Johnson knew of that effect, and the original design for the Gallery – there’s actually a photo – there’re a couple of photos around of him, and they actually installed these for a while – you know, each one is circular, and they did put cylindrical display cases in the middle of each of those pods, so if you put a cylindrical – and they were sort of white, painted white on the bottom. If you put a cylinder in the middle of each one of those pods, it negates the effect of the echo because no one can stand there. But what happened was is that when they put these cylinders in each of the pods they realized there wasn’t enough display space. And, of course, knowing basic geometry, if you have a circle, you can put more in a circle by putting it around the outer circumference than the inner circumference. So, they got rid of these cylindrical display cases, and then mostly put objects – you know, there’re some exceptions – but mostly put objects around the circumference of each of the pods, therefore they could put more in. But suddenly the center of each pod was now open, and the result was the echo effect. These are the things you learn.

CW: Were there any major acquisitions for the Collection/Museum when you were there?

JQ: There were no major acquisitions, because these days people are highly sensitive to purchasing pre-Columbian objects from galleries. Even those with supposedly so-called “clean passports” have potential problems. I mean, look at the supposedly clean passport of the Machu Picchu collections at Yale and the troubles they had. And I was sorely tempted a few times – I was even told by Angeliki in particular that there was money available for purchases – and I was sorely tempted to propose that we buy something. But I decided that the better course of wisdom was not to do it because I didn’t want to get the institution and myself in hot water by buying something and then having the hounds of Hades loosened on us. And I will say that in particular that the archaeologists here at Harvard are highly sensitive to that, and since D.O. is a Harvard-affiliated organization I didn’t want to wind up in a situation in which I was doing something which would not meet with the approval of the archaeologists here. And as you will find out when you talk to Mike Coe – and you may have found out from Betty Benson or will find out when you talk to her – this issue of collectors, collecting, purchasing, the ridge between archaeology and art history are all very hot button issues that surround the Pre-Columbian studies program at D.O., are related to Betty, are related to Mike, related to Harvard’s relationship with D.O. over the years, and I just didn’t want to get involved in any of that. I thought better just not to buy anything and stay out of it than to put my neck in a noose. Now there were a few exceptions. There were a few gifts of collections of mostly local D.C. people who wanted to give D.O. collections, but most of those things were few in number. There were a couple significant objects but no really sort of Bliss-quality objects by and large. There were some of these gifts. The other thing that we did is when Carol Callaway died we got – there was money given in her name to Pre-Columbian Studies at D.O. We came to the Peabody, we asked to find a piece owned by the Peabody that had clear papers, that was old enough that there was no question that it was legally in the country and we paid for the money to restore that object and then study it, we took a radiocarbon date and restored it, brought it to D.O. – it’s on a 99-year loan I believe to D.O. – and it’s got a plaque in – I don’t know if it’s in exhibit right now but it was given, well done in Carol’s memory. And it was very pleasing to me that Leonardo Lopez Lujan, who is a big name in Mexican archaeology, deliberately mentioned in an article he wrote the great example that Dumbarton Oaks did in doing this as opposed to, he said, that nasty museum in France that just opened which is dealing with antiquities and dealers and stuff. So, we came out smelling like a rose in doing that, and it was the right thing to do.

ABF: But were there any other serious repatriation issues that you had to deal with?

JQ: No. In actual fact I believe that the collection at Dumbarton Oaks all came in well before the UNESCO agreements. There may be a few things that might – I think they’re all legal. There might be a few things that, you know – there’s two dates. One, which is the ‘best practice,’ which is I think 1971, and then there’s a later date which is the absolute cutoff date. And some may have come in after the ‘best practice’ ’71 date, but generally they’re – actually, objects are quite clean – although, if you get in the law court you can argue six ways to Sunday that they are or they’re not, just like with the Yale collection. I mean, that is – depending on which lawyer you talk to, Yale has got an absolute title to the collection or it doesn’t and what we could – Dumbarton Oaks could wind up in the same kind of muddle if somebody wanted to make an issue of it. I think, frankly, that the fact that Dumbarton Oaks did reach out to Latin American scholars actively – and it’s not just me it’s Elizabeth Boone and Betty Benson as well – that we support scholarship in Latin America that we do these steps. I think, knock on wood, that the attitude is that whatever claims might or might not be made against an object or getting an object back here or there are not worth it, the good will and good working relationships that we’ve established and hope to maintain now. It reminds me, we had an exhibit here in the Peabody on Moche ceramics that I curated, and this distinguished Peruvian colleague Luis Jaime Castillo was here. He gave the opening address – so forth and so on – and we had a reception in the gallery and everything was going along fine. We were having a little wine and a little cheese. And I was there, Luis Jaime was there, I was here, and suddenly this woman comes up and says, ‘So Professor Castillo, is Peru planning to ask for all these back?’ And I went, “Uhhhhh.” And he said, “No, madam. We have plenty of our own, and better ones.”

ABF: From what you were saying it sounds like the position you were in as curator and the dealings you had with the Collection dovetailed very nicely with your academic roles and that you were able to enhance the general standing of the Collection by reaching out in a scholarly environment.

JQ: Absolutely. I mean, not every Fellow who comes to D.O. is specifically interested in the objects. They have their own research projects. It’d just be like, if you were – you’re both classicists – you know, if you went to some – there’s the Hellenic center. I mean, everything that they’ve got isn’t necessarily pertinent to your interests but you may be casually interested in it because you’re generally interested in your field. Same thing’s true at D.O. I mean, the people that come there – I’m sure it’s true in Byzantine, too – the collections may or may not to a greater or lesser degree influence or be of interest to them, per se. But Betty Benson always makes a big point of talking about how the program and the library would not be there if it weren’t for the collections. The collections are the foundations of everything because it was Robert Bliss’s collecting of those objects that led to everything else. That for no other reason is why they should be treasured, as well as that they’re spectacular objects. They’re – many of them are unique and so forth. But yeah, I think that for me having the curatorial and the Director of Studies role was great because it allowed for a certain kind of synergy to occur that may not have occurred otherwise.

ABF: Do you think that set a precedent?

JQ: For?

ABF: For more of that type of –

JQ: Well, it didn’t set much of a precedent because the reorganizations got rid of all that. It’s also true that even the Byzantines didn’t – see, that’s another example of the differences that existed because the Byzantines didn’t have this Director. The Byzantines had Alice-Mary as Director of Studies and Sue Boyd as Curator. They were two separate posts, though they work closely together.

CW: We should take a minute to change the tape.

JQ: Sure.

JQ: So where were we?

ABF: We were talking about the synergistic –

JQ: Synergy, ah, synergy baby. For me it was – I liked working with the collections, I liked being Director of Study. I liked it all. The only thing I didn’t like, and that was that – and this is actually quite a big point of mine – is that I didn’t have a lot of time for my own research. I got two weeks of research leave a year, plus vacation – and the vacation was generous. And I used to use my vacation for my research, which didn’t make my wife very happy, but I had to balance those things. And I think that that is unfortunate because I think that one of the ways D.O. – and again I would submit that this is true not only for Pre-Columbian Studies but for the other programs too – one of the ways that the place remains a vital energetic lively relevant center is if the relevant Directors of Studies are active scholars and have plenty of time to do their own research. And two weeks a year doesn’t cut it. Furthermore, two weeks – now, of course, you may say – I mean, one of the arguments, one of the rationales I think for it is – well, you’re in the middle of this library, not every day is going to be a day filled with meetings and administrative responsibilities, so you do have time. And I was told by Angeliki that if you have time during the day to do a spot of your own research using the library or sitting at your desk by all means go ahead. We trust that you’ll take care of business in terms of making sure that all your responsibilities are attended to, that if you have some time you are free to devote it to your own research as you find the time whenever if occurs. That was fine and I did make some use of that. The problem is that by maintaining that approach and still keeping it only to two weeks a year you’re biasing the selection and even the likely applicants for future Directors of Study to people who are primarily book-oriented, library-oriented in terms of their research. And I think it’s healthy for Dumbarton Oaks in the long term that the Directors of Study should vary from being say art historians who are mostly library bound, or historians who are definitely library bound, to include field archaeologists who have to go out and dig. It’s a healthier environment for – it’s healthy for an institution to have that variation over the long term. And furthermore, I also think that it’s healthy for the institution if it and its people actively pursue research. That is to say, that the Directors of Studies are fully engaged scholars. I, in my darker hours at D.O., used to describe my job as that of a maître d’ in a very nice restaurant. You get to wear nice clothes, you get to work in a beautiful place, and you get to meet high-class guests and put them at the right table or maybe put them at a table next to a bathroom, but you don’t get to sit down much and eat yourself. And if the job winds up or becomes increasingly in that mode you’re not going to get good people who want to serve in that role. And the institution as a whole will suffer I think because the institution will lose the respect of other scholars who say, “Well so-and-so, you know, poor schmoe, he’s stuck there holding the door as we go out.” Now I think Joanne’s an excellent scholar. I think I was a pretty good one. I know Elizabeth Boone and Betty Benson were ones. But I think that this is something that has to be carefully considered in terms of the future of D.O. for the long term. And, I mean, I was guaranteed by word of mouth by Angeliki that I was supposed to get a year research leave between my two terms. I never got it because I was told that I was needed to help build the new library, to help be on committees, which I was. But maintain those kinds of commitments and maintain the kind of commitment that Directors of Study are active scholars and that their scholarship’s supported is something I think is very important. If I were Director of D.O., I would consider every other year closing the whole place down for the summer and letting the staff and scholars go off and do research. It could survive. Actually, they used to do that. Back in the ’50s and ’60s they did close for the summer. Or have a skeleton staff to take care of summer Fellows but let the Director of Study go off and if they want to dig or even if they’re doing art history, they want to go and look at sites for two months, let ’em go. I mean, you wouldn’t have to do it every year necessarily but I think having that kind of flexibility and having that kind of encouragement that you want the Directors of Studies to be active scholars and not simply administrators is critical, and I don’t think that was very well handled while I was there.

ABF: What are your thoughts on the new library?

JQ: Well, I had a lot to do with it. I was on a lot of committees that helped plan it and I don’t know what the new library’s like because I have visited it once, briefly, strolled through it. It was, I think it was my second – when did they have the big inauguration? Was that last October? I think so. It was like two or three months before that so I don’t know – how successful the library is depends upon how easy it is to use and how comfortable the scholars are in using it, and since I’ve not used it at all but sort of walked through it I can’t speak to it in that sense. I mean theoretically it’s a fine idea. I hear it’s very cold.

CW and ABF: True.

JQ: I think that the – I got a sense that things were moving to – I remember Ned Keenan saying the problem with D.O, now, which meant that when we were in the old system, was that the books are where the people should be and the people are where the books should be. That is to say, the books were all up on the upper floors of the main building in rooms that were getting plenty of sunlight and the people were down in the basement, a lot of them in the dark, and it should be the other way around, and that when the new library is built we’d fix that. And I thought that was right on. I think that the library should be there for the scholars. The scholars should not be intimidated or made to feel uncomfortable for the sake of the books. I don’t know why it’s so cold. If they’re keeping it cold for the books they should warm it up because the people are more important than the books. The books should figure out how to deal for themselves. Rare books I presume are in a rare book room, which is going to be differently controlled anyhow. But I don’t know these things except through hearsay, so I can’t say.

CW: You mentioned earlier that you were still working on some publications left over from D.O. years. Is that the main way you’ve been involved with D.O. still?

JQ: Mostly, yeah. I didn’t go to any – I have not been back to any pre-Columbian symposia for two reasons. One is – main reason was I wanted to give Joanne Pillsbury some space. I don’t think of myself as a big scary guy but having somebody looking over you, “Oh, there’s the previous Director of Studies. Are they going to think –?” One of the great things Elizabeth Boone did for me when I came is she left me alone. She didn’t come to D.O. for quite a long time. She just didn’t come. After a couple years she popped in once to use the library briefly, but she didn’t come to any meetings. And I presume that was done just to simply allow me to find my own path and to feel comfortable and so I’m just doing the same for Joanne. But maybe after this year I’ll – the second reason was that they’ve all heretofore been overseas and it just didn’t work out for me to be able to get away. And if you’re going to Guatemala for a conference, you want to spend three or four days looking around as well, and I just didn’t have the time. But I’ll go back eventually. I mean, I love D.O. It’s a part of me. I love D.O., I love the people there. I’ll be back. But I just wanted to give Joanne plenty of elbowroom to start with.

CW: Did D.O. play a role in any field work or did you have any oversight in that in your years?

JQ: Well, I mean, this is sort of picking up on what I was already saying. The interesting thing is I asked around, “Well, why doesn’t D.O. fund field work, why don’t we fund our own field work?” And what I was told was that back in the, I guess the late ‘50s, D.O. did fund a lot of fieldwork. It funded a huge amount of fieldwork in Byzantium-land.

ABF: Yeah, in Turkey. The Hagia Sophia and the Kariye Djami.

JQ: Exactly. And what I was told – and again this is all hearsay – but what I was told is what happened was that they didn’t keep good track of the books and that the money – no one was controlling the money and the money was going out the door and there was nothing to show for it and that the publications weren’t coming. I mean, what’s the product here? The product is some sort of publication. That wasn’t – supposedly there’s still a collection somewhere in Manchester or Birmingham – there’s a D.O. collection of pottery sherds from some Byzantine-sponsored excavation that’s still there waiting to be picked – maybe you could get that gig, a free trip to England. And that it just got so out of control that they said, “We’re just going to stop this altogether.”

ABF: There are some major publications on churches, but –

JQ: Right. No, I don’t think everything was a disaster – I think that – and again this is Byzantine, it’s not Pre-Columbian – but my understanding is that, yeah, there were some successful projects and publications that came out of it. But that there was enough chaos in terms of other things and the money was not being accounted for as well as it might have been that they just decided to cut it off at the knees, which is understandable. But I thought it was unfortunate that there was then this draconian policy of, well, we’re not going to fund any of this ourselves. They do give out these project grants for endangered sites or special projects that other people do, but again I think that – and again this is just my opinion – but I think that D.O. is in a vital place as a center to which other people come, other scholars come and do work and that’s good, it should always do that and should always be that, but I think it’s important that D.O. have its own research engine cranking as well. You don’t want to be just an empty vessel that is only filled up by other scholars. You want to have enough of an internal combustion, if you will, that you’re creating your own heat and hopefully light as well. And one way to do that is to have some projects. They have to be – you have to make sure you don’t go out of control and maybe pick the right ones and so forth, but I think that would be a good thing. And despite all my carping, D.O. actually did provide a small amount of money for my project, which I’m just winding up now, my initial project that I am doing in Peru excavating a colonial period church. So, I thank them very much. Thank you.

CW: And was there – what sort of transition was there between the directorships of Laiou and Keenan? Because you spent time –

JQ: Well, what do you mean by what –?

CW: Well, how did you – I guess, what was your experience of dealing with their different styles, or was there a smooth process, or D.O. as a whole –?

ABF: In transition –

JQ: Well, there were definitely differences. Angeliki’s philosophy as best I could understand it was frankly a kind of status quo. You’re pre-Columbian studies. You’re small, but don’t ask me for anything more than you’ve got. Be happy with what you’ve got. Yes, Byzantine’s bigger than you, too bad. Be happy with what you’ve got. And so long as that was understood I was pretty much free to do what I wanted to do in terms of working within Pre-Columbian Studies. That’s why I said to her one day, “Well, you know, we must all hang together or surely hang separately.” And she said, “Right. Yes. You’ve got it.” She wouldn’t say, “You’ve got it,” but – When Ned came, well, there was a transition period literally because he kept on coming up to Harvard. He was still teaching a class, he wasn’t really full-time at D.O. for a while and that was kind of frustrating because I think that – I know Jan is coming back too – but it seems to me that at least in those days D.O. really needed a full-time director. There was enough stuff that was happening. Maybe it’s not true now. Ned really kind of in the first few years – it was like, “Let’s rock and roll.” And the first few years with Ned were great because he was a much more open, engaged, dynamic person than Angeliki. Angeliki – I was, I think, three years there while she was Director – she came to lunch with the Fellows probably once. That was just her style. She wanted to have her own time. And I actually got along well with Angeliki, and she was great at parties. She gave great parties. When she was not in her focused mood she could be a lot of fun. But she was a scholar who wanted to maximize the amount of time doing scholarship. And there was a definite sense of hierarchy with Angeliki, but it was all clear and understood and once you understood the parameters in which we were working I think I got along fine with her. Ned was much more collegial, open, came to lunch every day for the first few years, met regularly with all three directors which was something that Angeliki didn’t do. We used to have directors meetings which would be the three Directors of Studies and Ned once a week, I think for the first few years. I said to Ned that I’d like to do a poster. Have you seen the pre-Columbian poster? I don’t know if they still sell it. It’s of the Wari mirror. Is the gift shop open again?

CW: It is open.

JQ: Well, they should be selling that poster because we’ve got stacks of them.

ABF: We’ll check it out.

JQ: Yeah. I said, “I’d like to do a poster.” He said, “Do a poster! Want to do a poster too? You do a poster!” So it was this great sense of excitement, anything’s possible, new programs, it was great. Things started to get – once – I was there for I guess that would be seven years out of Ned’s total – and once we really committed to the new library I think Ned carried a very heavy burden. It was a lot of work for him. He had to deal with architects, he started reorganizing things internally, and I think it was – I know it was a big stress on me. I was going to meetings. There were all sorts of committee meetings for all different aspects of the project, and I used to be annoyed that I didn’t feel I had enough time to do my own work, my own research. I was reaching the point at the height of the planning for the buildings where I felt I couldn’t even do the Pre-Columbian, I couldn’t even do the research, I couldn’t even do the administrative work for Pre-Columbian Studies. But that was getting out of my grasp because some days, two or three days in a row, I’d be going to meetings that were from nine to five or beyond, and still supposedly running this Pre-Columbian Studies program and trying to do some of my own scholarship. And of course I think it was ten times worse for Ned because he was at the center of it all. So, I think by the end, I mean he was partly tired and partly – and various issues came up that became touchy. I mean, I was annoyed that I didn’t get my research leave, some of the restructuring in terms of the organization of D.O. were things that I thought maybe deserved more thorough examination – that were done perhaps what I thought was a bit autocratically. For example, like I said before I thought that changing the collections to a museum might be the right thing to do, but it was done I thought without a real thorough discussion of what the implications of that were. One of the things that happened was Ned rationalized Dumbarton Oaks, and he rationalized it in the following way. When he got there under Angeliki and prior to Angeliki, Dumbarton Oaks was basically a mom-and-pop research organization. It was a research institute. Who was mom? Who was pop? Mildred and Bob. OK? And it was organized – if you wanted to draw an organizational chart of Dumbarton Oaks, you’d have the Director, which would be Angeliki or Ned, and then the next line down would be the Directors of Studies, and then – I mean you could draw the branches for Marlene in terms of finance and so forth and so on, but the core of it I would argue was that pyramid. Now each Director of Study was in charge of a librarian, and in Byzantine – well there were equivalents in Landscape too – and each in charge of basically some sort of curator in charge of collections, rare books for garden and objects for Byzantine and pre-Columbian. In rationalizing it, what happened was that instead of having three separate libraries basically we have one library. And the librarians no longer reported to the Directors of Studies – they now report to the head librarian, over there. And the curators no longer report to the Director of Studies, they report to the Director of the Museum, over there. So, now that’s how it’s been rationalized, on a model of function instead of program. I can understand why that was done, but I think this is very, very dangerous because it diminishes the authority and the role of the programs of this research and the scholarship and it elevates the functional roles. I mean, the second most powerful – outside of Marlene and whoever’s in charge of the grounds – and the garden’s a separate thing too, Gail’s great – but outside of the infrastructural functions and the financial ones, the second most powerful person of Dumbarton Oaks now is the head of the library. And that’s the way maybe most libraries are or most institutions in which the library – I mean, the main – we talked a lot about the collections but the real truth of the matter is that for the scholars who come there – Fellows and Junior Fellows and Visiting Scholars – the main reason they come, besides the food and the gardens and the pool in the summer, is the library. So it’s understandable why in a sense the rationalization leads to the Director of the library becoming the second most important person. But I worry that in that happening suddenly the whole raison d’être of the place has shifted and it’s shifted away from the study programs as being the core, before the study programs were the core of which that included the library and the collections, now it’s been fractionated in a way that I think could lead to trouble. So long as the current Director and future directors make sure that the centrality and importance of the Directors of Studies and the research that goes on there and the programs that go on there are maintained I guess it’ll be OK. But I think that’s a danger as a result of this rationalizing process. But I am not there anymore so I can’t worry too much.

CW: And I guess our, as I said, very broad final question which was asked of Betty Benson by Elizabeth Boone is how do you see the role – and you’ve touched upon this in many of your answers – but how do you see the role of D.O. in pre-Columbian studies? I think it’s very interesting what you were saying about bringing more Latin American scholars to D.O.

ABF: And also about D.O. being the only place where there really is pre-Columbian studies for everybody.

JQ: Well, I think that there’s – it’s hard to say for sure. I think D.O. still has that preeminent role. I think though – I think things have changed – I mean, a lot has changed in the landscape of scholarship in general, not just in the last ten or twelve years but in the last, say, twenty years. I mean, for example, twenty years ago everybody who was anybody waited for the next D.O. publication with baited breath. Of course, it was totally out of your field – you wouldn’t – but I think there’s a lot more being published. There’s a lot more pre-Columbian books being published by various – for example the Cotsen Institute at UCLA, very powerful, very well-endowed, very successful. It’s connected to a university directly – it’s at UCLA – so how it works it a bit different. Scholarly resources in general are more accessible thanks to the internet – not everything – but having those kinds of options to do bibliographic kinds of work or even primary documents didn’t exist even ten years ago. When I started at D.O., my secretary used to leave those pink “While You Were Out” slips all over my desk, and she’d still funnel calls to me, all this sort of stuff. I came to D.O. by the way with a second generation Macintosh laptop.

CW: About this big?

JQ: Yeah, and it was more powerful than the desktop Macintosh Classic that I was offered. You know what the difference was? Mine had 40 gigabytes, and theirs had 30 total memory. And they did upgrade in a year or two, but 40 gigabytes was considered huge. So, I think that D.O. is still a very important place for pre-Columbian studies. I still think it’s in the vanguard. I think it has to be careful – Pre-Columbian Studies has to be careful – because there is a lot more going on out there than there was. There’s a lot more research being done in Latin America and there are a lot more first-class scholars in Latin America than I would say there were in the previous generation. The quality of publications in Latin America is a lot better than it used to be. I mean, back in the ’70s in Peru and in the ’80s, partly due to the internal politics of Peru but partly just due to the lack of – I mean, you can publish a quality publication with a desktop and computer and printer these days in a way you couldn’t – it was mimeograph, mimeograph on paper that was like toilet paper back in – thirty years ago. So all the gray literature that’s available either on the internet or just by people doing these kinds of desktop publishing, it’s created very different kinds of landscape. So I think D.O. is still in a prime location, an important location, but it’s in a somewhat more crowded field. And it will have to be agile to maintain its position of leadership. But long may she wave.

ABF: Thank you very much.

JQ: Thank you. It’s been fun and illuminating. I hope I helped. Didn’t mean to say anything mean about anybody.

CW: Is there anything you were expecting to talk about?

ABF: Yeah, that we didn’t touch on?

JQ: No, I think you covered it pretty well.

ABF: If you have anything to add, let us know.

]]>No publisherPre-Columbian CollectionOral History ProjectPre-Columbian StudiesArchives2012/08/08 08:35:00 GMT-4PageElizabeth P. Bensonhttp://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/elizabeth-p.-benson
Oral History Interview with Elizabeth P. Benson, undertaken by Elizabeth Boone at the Dumbarton Oaks Guest House (Fellows Building) on May 13 and 16, 2008. At Dumbarton Oaks, Betty Benson was Assistant Curator of the Pre-Columbian Collection (1963–1965), Curator of the Pre-Columbian Collection (1965–1979), and Director of Pre-Columbian Studies (1973–1978).EB: My name is Elizabeth Boone, this is Elizabeth Benson; we’re here in the Fellows Building at Dumbarton Oaks for this interview. It’s May 13, 2008. We’re being recorded, or Betty Benson is being recorded, by Joe Mills. So Betty, let’s get started talking about you and Mr. Bliss, and the National Gallery of Art, and how you came to know him, and what was that like?

BB: I was the assistant registrar at the National Gallery, and everything that came into the National Gallery or went out of it came through our office, so I saw all of those things. There had been a previous registrar, Charles Richards, some years before, who had been very interested in the pre-Columbian things and had worked with Mr. Bliss and his things. But largely the National Gallery was—still is—essentially a gallery of European and American painting, and they’re not terribly interested in other things, although they certainly show them and give attention to them, and they recently opened those good sculpture galleries. But –

EB: How did Mr. Bliss come to have objects at the National Gallery?

BB: Mr. Bliss felt very strongly that his objects were art objects, and at that time there were – Cleveland had, the Cleveland Museum of Art had a few pre-Columbian objects in it. I think it was 1947 that the Bliss collection came to the National Gallery on loan. But there was no pre-Columbian collection in any art museum. The pre-Columbian things were all in ethnographic museums, natural history museums, but not art, and Mr. Bliss felt that they were art and should be shown in an art museum, and he talked to David Finley, the Director, and John Walker, the chief curator, and persuaded them that they would like to have his pre-Columbian objects on loan there. And indeed they were on loan there from 1947 until 1962, when Mr. Bliss died. So that’s how they got there. Mr. Bliss was – I think sometimes probably things were sent in; I don’t really remember all the details of that, but I do remember Mr. Bliss coming in, sometimes with a little object in his pocket, a piece of jade or something, and he would say, “I want you to see my latest temptation,” or something like that. Or his chauffeur, a very nice man named Garrett, would come in with a basket or a box, or carrying some kind of package with another object to be seen, and these things were on deposit there. All these things were coming in after the 1947 installation of the collection, and they were beginning to pile up or – they weren’t pileable – but they were multiplying in storage in the registrar’s vault. And Lester Cook, who was a curator at the National Gallery, and I decided that we wanted to reinstall the collection, and we got the permission of John Walker and Mr. Bliss, and we had a great fun doing this. And there are some photographs, National Gallery photographs, of both installations, which can be compared. But the earlier installation had painted backgrounds. As I recall the general – the wall and the, most of the case backgrounds were of a sort of ecru color, but some of the case backgrounds were kind of brick red, and that was pretty good behind the gold. But we put in velvet and all sorts of textile-y things. We had a lot of fun with that. So we did use some of these things that Mr. Bliss had been bringing in.

EB: When did you do the reinstallation, Betty?

BB: I don’t remember the exact year; it was in the late ’50s.

EB: When did you – we’re perhaps jumping ahead – but when did you come to the National Gallery, and if you could talk about that a little bit, because that was actually prior to your meeting Mr. Bliss, or –?

BB: Well, but I worked in other parts of the National Gallery and had not met him. I only knew him, really, when I was working in the registrar’s office in the ’50s. I occasionally saw him at a party somewhere; but I think that was after I knew him at the Gallery. I remember once meeting him at a cocktail party, and I guess I had a glass in my right hand – I don’t know why I couldn’t switch it around, but for some reason he extended his hand – and I had to give him my left hand, and I apologized for giving him my left hand, and he said, “Oh, that’s very good: it’s closer to your heart.” He was a very elegant man, a very nice man. He was a good diplomat, I think. He was a tall man with very fine carriage, not really a handsome face, but a good face; and, a quiet man, but a very perceptive and humorous man. Often – and I think you’ve heard one story that he came in one day, and I took him into the registrar’s vault for some reason, where his things were – it must have been when we were doing that installation, where we had an object truck with drawers in it, and in one of these we had taken out the Wari things. And there was a Wari hat under these piled cloth hats, and I had put in it that tiny Wari mosaic man which is, I think, less than an inch tall. And I think I had put it in the hat because it had no case of its own, and that was a good safe, soft place for it. But when Mr. Bliss came in there with me, I thought, “Boy, that doesn’t look like very good curatorship, and so –” And Mr. Bliss looked at it and said, “He capsized.” So he was quite delightful. He was very well groomed, very well tailored, and he stood well and he looked good. Those were the days when men wore white shirts and occasionally, if you were doing something very informal, you might wear a blue shirt, and Mr. Bliss came in one day and I thought, “He’s got on a pink shirt!” And as I got closer to him I realized it wasn’t a pink shirt; it was a shirt of very fine white and red stripes, so this was the sort of elegance.

EB: A striped shirt was more formal than a pink shirt.

BB: Well, somehow it looked – a pink shirt, it had a sort of other connotation, but when it was a red-and-white striped shirt, that was rather finer – in my mind, anyway.

EB: So, when he would bring the objects in, he would bring them himself? Would he set up an appointment, or would he just arrive, or –?

BB: No, he had a secretary, Mrs. Hassan, I think she was Catherine Hassan, whom I knew on the telephone for years, but I didn’t meet her until after he died. But she would call and say, “Mr. Bliss would like to come and bring something in,” and I would say, “Fine.” So it was always set up.

EB: So, what was it like to work with him? You talked about some of your interactions, at the National Gallery, but are there others that are particularly memorable?

BB: There’s one memorable one, which is really a very tiny thing, and yet it made an impression on me. We were in the storeroom one day, in the wrapping room, and Mr. Bliss was in there with me, and I was apparently wrapping up something for him, and he was standing there beside me, and we were talking, I think, and as I got to the point where I had to tie the string on, immediately Mr. Bliss’ finger came down to hold this knot in the string. I mean, this is a very small thing, but there are an awful lot of people in the world who would not think to do that or not bother to do that, and that impressed me.

EB: I can certainly see why.

BB: But those are the kinds of relationships I had with him, and I –

EB: Did he talk to you at all about his love for pre-Columbian art or his particular interest in that?

BB: He made it obvious by his attitude toward the things he brought in. Now, what he brought in or what came in – I think some things were sent in by dealers. He didn’t acquire all these – some of them went out again – but some of them were things he was considering.

EB: So, he would have them come in on approval?

BB: Yeah, yeah. Well, he thought about it, and yeah, so. But we didn’t go into any long digressions about his attitude, and yet it was obvious from the way he handled objects and thought about them, and he has said this, of course, in print. He had a book done – it came out in 1957. It was a text by Samuel Lothropand these extraordinary photographs by Nicholas Murraywhich have finger-painted backgrounds and other rather extravagant things, but there are wonderful photographs of the objects, so that – And he talks in that and in other places about his feeling that this was art and that these were fine objects. He was, I’m quite sure, the first person to collect from an aesthetic point of view. I was thinking about people who were collecting about the same time: George Hewitt Myers of the Textile Museum collected some fine objects, some of which Dumbarton Oaks later acquired, but those were things that just sort of appealed to him. He was seriously interested in textiles and probably mostly Oriental rugs. There was a man in Montreal named Cleveland Morgan, F. Cleveland Morgan, who gave some very good pre-Columbian objects to the Montreal museum, but there were just a few things, and he was not really seriously interested in that. And Heye, of course, was collecting – these were all collecting about the same time, and I can sort of imagine, you know, they were – which dealer would try to sell what to whom, and whether they were sort of rivals in these times – but Heye of course was interested in collected everything that was Indian. But Mr. Bliss wanted art objects. A little later Rockefeller came into this, but Bliss was earlier.

EB: So Rockefeller was later.

BB: Yeah.

EB: With the objects that came in, and some left again, do you have a sense of why those that left, left; does that tell you anything about the internal workings of his aesthetic, or his aesthetic sensibility?BB: I have no – I don’t remember, really, what stayed and what went, now, and I don’t think it was always – I think probably there were one or two things that I thought, “Is he really going to buy that?” And he didn’t. So there was that sort of thing. But I think sometimes it may have been that he simply wasn’t that seriously interested, or something else, something other was offered, and –

EB: Can you talk to us about some of his advisors? Certainly Samuel Lothrop looms large, but I didn’t know whether there were other advisors, or did you have a sense of –?

BB: The other most important one was Matthew Stirling at the Smithsonian. And of course Mr. Bliss was particularly fond of Olmec things. His first piece was Olmec, and he collected a lot of Olmec objects. And Stirling came in often and was very interested. I’ve been looking through things recently to sort of revive my past, and someone had written – maybe, I think in an obituary of Mr. Bliss – it was an archaeologist who wrote this – possibly Clifford Evans – that Mr. Bliss’s main advisors were Lothrop and Stirling, two of the first rigorous American archaeologists. You know archeology, American archaeology was fairly new in those days, and Mr. Bliss got the best people to advise him, and I think that tells you something about him and his taste.

EB: Now Sam Lothrop was based here or in New York?

BB: No, Sam Lothrop was at Harvard.

EB: At Harvard. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

BB: Yeah, yeah.

EB: And of course Mr. Bliss was Harvard.

BB: Yes, yeah. And so Lothrop was influential, and I think we have to talk more about him I guess a little later, because although – well, I can say this now – he was on the advisory committee when the collection first came to Dumbarton Oaks, but he died shortly afterwards. But I think that he advised, after Mr. Bliss’s death – I think Lothrop advised Jack Thacher about setting up the committee and other things like that – people to use.

EB: Great. We can come back to that. But let’s talk about the collection at the National Gallery. Do you have a sense of what the reaction was on the part of the public or the National Gallery insiders to the collection? It was in the basement, I believe, is that correct?

BB: It was in that gallery space between where the restaurant under the dome is now and the central gallery, which was always the temporary exhibition space, the big long gallery. And so a lot of people went through that space, it was not just – we didn’t really think of it as in the basement – there’s a floor or two below that even – but it was in the lower floor just as you come in the Constitution Avenue door. And it stayed there for fifteen years, so the Gallery must have been reasonably happy with it, and I think that the public – it was, I think, a nice change of pace between looking at paintings and looking at paintings. And although the central gallery had other kinds of exhibitions too, but I think it seemed to be very successful there, and I think it surely did widen interest in pre-Columbian art, because a lot of people would go through without really seeing anything, but there were other people who would say, “Hey, that’s pretty interesting,” and it, I think –

EB: Was Mr. Bliss involved very much with the OAS? Because I think I remember the Inka tunic being first published, a fragment of it being published in the Américas magazine. Was this correct?

BB: I wasn’t aware of any particular association. He had – he certainly was interested in Latin America: he had been Ambassador to Argentina, he had traveled in Mexico, and I dearly loved the pictures that James Carder has in his files here of Mr. Bliss on a Mexican trip, standing bare-chested beside his horse or—I don’t know if it was a horse or a donkey he was riding, but – and he’s traveling through Mexico, and of course since I’ve just described how I knew Mr. Bliss, I think this is a marvelous picture of him.

EB: I’ll bet.

BB: But I mean he would have been interested certainly in what the OAS was doing and publishing, but I don’t think he had any special “in” with them.

EB: When the collection was at the National Gallery, were there lectures or programs or anything developed there?

BB: I don’t believe so; I don’t recall anything. I don’t think so.

EB: My other question was, and this is – I’ve just heard a story – probably false, that you and Julie Jones were both at the Gallery when the opportunity to work with Mr. Bliss became available, but also the Rockefeller collection was then being made public, and that one of you decided to come here, and one there. I just heard that story and I never knew that story.

BB: Well, some parts of that are right. Julie and I were at the Gallery at the same time, and we were friends there. I don’t remember – I meant to call her and ask her about this, I don’t remember exactly what her schedule was. But I left the National Gallery at the beginning, I think, of 1961, and went to New York, where I stayed for a year and a half, until I got – actually I was in Maine when I got the phone call from John Thacher, the Director of Dumbarton Oaks, asking me if I would come and set up the collection. And I really came down as a temporary job. I hadn’t intended to stay at Dumbarton Oaks. And Julie at some point – and I can’t remember how this coordinated – went to New York – and I don’t remember whether she first went – she had become interested in the Bliss collection too; that converted both of us, for two people – I don’t remember whether she was first at the Museum of Primitive Art and then started her doctorate at NYU, or the other way around, but I think – I don’t really remember seeing her in New York at that time, so she probably came a little later. I had talked to her about taking over at Dumbarton Oaks when I left, because I had planned to leave, and she had agreed to that. And then I decided that Dumbarton Oaks was a very nice place to stay, and I stayed on. I had to call Julie and say, “Is that all right with you?” and all of this went through Jack Thacher too, of course, but – so that’s that story.

EB: And then she went on to –

BB: Well, she was at the Museum of Primitive Art, and when that collection went to the Metropolitan, she went to the Metropolitan, yeah.

EB: So, when Mr. Bliss was thinking about bringing his collection to Dumbarton Oaks, were you in town at the time, or you were in New York?

BB: Oh, well I think it was always intended to come. He had given Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard. Dumbarton Oaks was their place, their heritage, and the pre-Columbian things would go with that, everything else came, went to Harvard, so –

EB: Do you have a sense of why he chose Philip Johnson to design the Pavilion, or what was the thinking there?

BB: I think the thinking there was John Thacher. Thacher knew Philip Johnson and admired him and was interested in what he was doing, and I think he said to the Blisses, “Look, here is somebody who could do something very interesting here” – something like that. I suspect that’s the way it goes. I have no proof for that except that I think it’s – it just looks like that.

EB: Because it’s interesting to think that the Garden Library and the Johnson Pavilion were being created at the same time in two very different styles.

BB: Yes, yes. No, no, it is interesting, because the Garden Library of course is much more traditional Dumbarton Oaks architecture. And the Philip Johnson wing, I think, looks not quite so much like a modern building in that atmosphere, but like a sort of garden pavilion, and I think it worked in that way. And in fact I think Mrs. Bliss – I think – I can’t remember what the early drawings looked like – but Mrs. Bliss contributed the idea of those little spaces where the plants are – I seem to talk about nothing but Mrs. Bliss’ love for plants, but she did do that. I’m sure that was added; I once saw some of the earlier drawings, and she had added that bit. So, she took to the design.

EB: I had heard they had had a scale model, a half-size model, of one of the pavilions, actually on display in the Music Room for a while. Is that true?

BB: I never knew anything about that. It’s possible, but I – well, it could be, because I don’t remember exactly when that started. Mr. Bliss died – was it in the early, early in’62, he was – Yeah, I don’t remember that. It’s possible, but I find it a little hard to imagine it.

EB: So, but you did get the sense that Mr. and Mrs. Bliss had a fair amount of input into the Johnson building?

BB: Yeah, well she certainly had input into the actual architecture, and I think Mr. Bliss obviously approved the plan, and I’d like to say that I think the Blisses were both very firm-minded people about what they wanted. They were open to ideas, they were open to Thacher’s ideas, they were open – and there’s a lot of this mentioned in the new installation – they were open to Royall Tyler’s ideas. Royall Tyler did introduce them to certain fields and certain things, but they weren’t going to go into that just because Royall Tyler showed this to them. And I think one thing – and this may have something to do with Royall Tyler – the Blisses did choose, in their particular fields of Pre-Columbian and Byzantine, to go into two rather unusual and unoccupied fields, you know. They didn’t start collecting Italian Renaissance painting or more conventional things. They collected fields that were less known, more open, and had much more room for scholarship, because I think they were thinking about that too.

EB: Going back to the Gallery itself, and then I want to talk – see if you could talk a little bit more about Mr. Thacher and Mr. Tyler – do you have a sense of other galleries that Mr. Bliss may have been particularly interested in or could have influenced the design, or is that just –?

BB: I just don’t know, because I was actually away during that period, for one thing.

EB: So, Mr. Bliss actually died before the building was completed.

BB: Yes. He saw it begun, I think, but he did, yeah.

EB: But he wouldn’t have seen the glass and he saw probably the –

BB: I don’t know what he saw, but he would have seen a drawing.

EB: Do you have a sense, or can you characterize Mildred Bliss’s impressions about the Johnson Pavilion, when it – her other responses to it at the time?

BB: When it opened, I think she was very much in favor of it, and as I say she did give Philip Johnson an idea for it, and she seemed to be sort of working with him, and I think she liked the idea.

EB: One of the things that struck me is that the pavilions always had – well, certainly plants in the planter’s sections – but also orchids in the middle of the pavilions, often. Is that a decision that Mrs. Bliss made?

BB: No, no, no. We did that as part of the installation, and maybe we’re approaching the installation now. There are lots of interesting things about that building, and one thing, I’m sure you’ve noticed, are the sound effects. And if you stand on one side and speak across, you sound loud to the person directly opposite to you. If you stand in the middle of the room, you come back at yourself, you scare yourself. Nobody else notices that. But we put things in the middle of the room really to keep people from having this experience of scaring themselves in there. And that’s how the plants got in there. I think all the plants that were in there were in the middle of the room.

EB: Let me ask you a little bit more about Jack Thacher, the first director of Dumbarton Oaks. What was his role in establishing Dumbarton Oaks?

BB: I think in a quiet way he was quite important. He was a person who had ideas of his own, but he worked well with the Blisses. I think it was a good match. They had a lot in common; they respected each other – that is as far as I can tell. And I think he made a lot of things work. He was good at finding people to do things, and he had very good ideas of his own, which were compatible with theirs. And I can’t tell you specific things – except, I think, Philip Johnson – but I think he had a great deal of influence and was a good creative means of putting their ideas in place.

EB: And so did he – so he was the one who called you and said, “Come and help us install and oversee this installation”? Did he also select the designer?

BB: They didn’t have designers in those days. The National Gallery didn’t have a designer in those days. When they hung a show, there was a guy, Fred Wreath, who was very good at hanging paintings, and he knew just how and where to hang them on the wall and in the space, and the curator of the show told him where to – what to put in the rooms, and that was how things – We didn’t have designers. If I may back up slightly on this, when I first – well, we’ll talk maybe about when I came down; before the building was finished I actually came to work for them – but when I first went into the building with Mr. Thatcher – as I called him then – and he took me around, and I said, “It’s a beautiful building. How do you put anything in it?” And we agreed that we didn’t want wooden cases; they would clash with the teak floors. We didn’t want metal cases; they would clash with the metal that was already there. Ideally we would float the objects in space, and about that time I read a newspaper story about an architect who took all his kitchen fixtures and held them up with jets of air. And I thought, you know, that’s what we might be doing, except of course one good power shortage, and we’ve lost everything. So, I think this put the idea in Jack’s head, and he found that, he talked to people at the Smithsonian – this is one of his ways of doing things – and he found out that they had some people on their exhibition staff who were working with clear plastic. And so we – I was going to say, “we borrowed.” I thought we were borrowing; I don’t think he ever went back. James Mayo, Jim Mayo, who came out, who was a sculptor, really – he didn’t get a chance to do much sculpture, but he was that and wanted to do that, and sort of made sculptural stands, I think — but for the installation I with consultation with Michael Coe – we haven’t got him in yet, but he was an important part of deciding what we would put in and where – and Thacher, who was involved in this too, and Jim Mayo, who made the cases and often had ideas about them. I would tell him, “I want a case this size, because we’re going to have these objects in this case,” and then Thacher and I had some arguments about how high the cases should be, and Jack wanted them, you know, proper height for his viewing, and I said, “Now wait a minute, I mean that’s fine for me, but there’re little kids who are going to come in here and look at some of these things,” so we tried to think of it in things that could be seen if they were at an upper level and things that were lower. It’s interesting. I was thinking today looking at this new installation, where almost everything is shown vertically, that that solves a lot of that problem, I think, because most of our things were shown horizontally. But the four people involved in the installation were Thacher and Benson and Coe and Mayo, and that was it. Now Jim Mayo was getting some help, I think, from other Smithsonian people, and one of them was Astor Moore, who later came in here. I – Astor Moore was a familiar face who would occasionally appear with Jim, but I didn’t really know him until he later came here as the cabinetmaker. One thing that Jim Mayo did very well was to glue those cases with glue that did not turn yellow. This we found out – there were two installations that Jim did not do. One was for the Kuna-Lacanha panel – whatever we’re calling it now, the horizontal one – and we had somebody in New York who did lots of cases for museums in New York, and we got him to make that thing. His seams turned yellow; Jim’s never did. Now Chris, who is here now, thinks it was Aston Moore who made that glue that didn’t yellow, that Jim was using. I simply don’t know that. I dealt entirely with Jim Mayo, and who developed that, I don’t know.

EB: So plexi-cases were just coming in, or was it –? I always felt that Dumbarton Oaks was one of the first, if not the first.

BB: I think it was. And I don’t know what the – I don’t think the Smithsonian ever did anything seriously with that. They may have made some vitrines, maybe that kind of thing, but I don’t think they were really into the other. The vitrine Plexiglas and the smaller mounting pieces you could buy by the whatever; the fatter ones had to be specially cast. Somebody mentioned the other day the name of that Plexiglas company, which is still apparently making Plexiglas in Rockville – I can’t think of their name at the moment, but that was – Oh, the other case was the big Palenque sculpture that we were looking at, and that was in three pieces. And somebody had filled out those damaged profiles on the figures, and we decided we wanted them as they were, as they had been, and not with this stuff put on it, but it was very soluble stuff that had been put on. And I remember one day – and this did not happen often – that Jack Thacher got down on the floor, and the two of us were down on the – the pieces were flat on the floor on a piece of canvas –

EB: And this was in the Pavilion?

BB: In the Pavilion. And we had some water and cloths, and we were down there – this stuff came off very easily – we were down there like two kids playing in the sandboxes. But we got somebody else to make that, because that just was not possible to do that in the Plexiglas mounting. It had to be bolted together and it had to be on a stand that would hold it seriously, and so we ordered this – or talked to the people about – this stone thing with the metal frame on the back, and I began to think about weight. How much weight was that floor meant to carry? Because that thing – I’ve forgotten now what it was going to weigh, but it was heavy. So I called up Philip Johnson’s office, and they sort of said, “Well, we don’t know. Call our engineers.” So I called the engineers, and they said that floor is designed to hold a hundred pounds per square inch, and I said, “Now wait a minute. I can go up there and stand on the ball of one foot, and that’s more than a hundred pounds per square inch,” and they said, “Well, yes, but that’s live weight; this is dead weight.” So, we had the thing made and we put it up there, and I must say that for a long time afterwards, every time I would go into what was then the Coin Room, where Alfred Bellinger had a desk right under that sculpture, and I would go and look at the ceiling above Alfred’s head. But those were some of the installation things. Philip Johnson – or I think it was probably someone in his office – designed a mock-up of a case. It was a round case about five feet wide, I guess, to go in the center of a room, and it was put in that room of the gallery, and I walked in there and I thought, “Uh-oh. This is just like being on a merry-go-round. This frame will not work.”

EB: Was it plexi, or –?

BB: I’ve forgotten. It was just something that they’d made as a mock-up. I think it was probably wood and something –

EB: – something else.

BB: Well, that was when I began to realize that that building is a square building. It’s made of circles, but it’s square, and it wants its squareness emphasized with anything you put in it. And this I kept saying to –

EB: So, that’s why you have the Palenque panel at one end and the Teotihuacan mural at the other end, in many ways sort of squaring off those –

BB: Yeah, well, because – well, one reason we put those in those places is that I think it’s sort of an attracting view. It draws your attention to have a big object at the end of your view and to go toward that, but those things should be that way anyway, and most of the cases – you can get away with the occasional diagonal case – but most of the cases we put flush with what would be the straight wall.

EB: So, Mr. Thacher found Jim Mayo.

BB: He found him. He found him, yeah.

EB: Now, I wanted to ask you about the opening, but you’ve mentioned Michael Coe several times, and he was so – I know we’ll talk about him later regarding the program – but it might be important to talk about his influence and his advice now about the installation and the collection.

BB: Yeah. He of course was not here, but he came down a couple of times, and he and I together went over the pieces that we did very much want to show and then talked about what should go with what, and he of course knew much more about these things than I did. So, he was invaluable on that.

EB: How was he chosen? Or how did he come to be a major advisor?

BB: He was the advisor; that was his title. And he was appointed early on, and I assume – he had been a student of Gordon Willey’s – and I assume that this was Jack Thacher and Lothrop probably asking Willey, maybe, something like that. I think that’s how he came in. He was at Yale but he had been at Harvard.

EB: So, did he advise Mr. Bliss also toward the end?

BB: No, no, no. Mr. Bliss died before Mike came on the scene. I’m quite sure there was no association there.

EB: So, are there other decisions about the aesthetics of the installation that would be interesting to highlight?

BB: Well, we simply tried to make things look as good as possible and to think of them as handsome objects and to show them off to their best advantage. I was thinking about the order that we did that in, and people say, you know, “Why do you come in on Aztec?” And Miriam and Juan Antonio asked this when they were starting the installation. And our idea, I’m pretty sure, was that you’ve just come from Byzantium, and this was what was going on in the New World at the same time, so you were in a totally different part of the world, but in the same era. And so, what they’ve done now – which I think is neat – they’ve also got some Inka things, as well as Aztec, in that room. And then we put Teotihuacan next door, I think partly because that mural is a good drawing card into that room and partly because it relates to Aztec as an important Central Mexican culture. And then Olmec is still in that next room, which throws you a little bit chronologically, but the two new people didn’t think of any better way to do that, I think.

EB: Well, the Mayan needs that far room.

BB: And well, that again was – putting the big sculpture at the end of the room was a way of drawing, I think. You’ve got to be drawn in by some big things, because there are an awful lot of little things in that collection, and that gets a little dull.

EB: Should we talk about the opening a little bit?

BB: Yeah.

EB: Do you want to take a break?

BB: We might as well go on, I guess.

EB: OK.

BB: The opening was scheduled for December of ’63, I think. I hope I’ve got the dates right. And not very long before that, of course, Kennedy was assassinated, and they had planned a more, you know – an elegant dinner party, and I don’t know what else, a much more elaborate opening for it. There’s somebody else I should mention in this too – is Thomas Baird, who is somebody I had known at the National Gallery when he was a Fellow there, and Tom was an art historian, but he was basically – he was a novelist. But for a while he went to museums that needed a curator for some special time to another. He ended up teaching at Trinity in Hartford, but he was at Dumbarton Oaks about the time of the installation, and I know he was there at the time of the opening. He probably contributed some ideas to that installation too. I don’t remember exactly when he came in, but I think of him at this moment because we sent out – invitations had been sent out for the big thing, which was being cancelled or reduced, and we had to send out a notice about this – and Tom, as a writer, was sort of in charge of writing this notice. And we all got into this big hassle over prepositions, which are always the most difficult part of any language, of course, you know, it was, “out of respect for,” or – so I remember that he was present and involved at that time. So, there were still a lot of people. President Pusey came down from Harvard, and I walked through the galleries with him before the crowd came in. And I’m not sure what he made of it; it wasn’t probably exactly to his primary taste, but he was always very good about what we wanted to do. And – I might as well throw this in now – that later, when we had the first conference, and Jack Thacher wrote an introduction, a preface to that Olmec conference volume, and he sort of as a courtesy sent it – his copy, his writing – to President Pusey, and Pusey wrote back and said, “That’s fine, except I don’t think you ought to call it the first in the series; you may never have another.” And as you know, we’ve had a conference every year since then, and they have all sooner or later been published. But anyway – But that was the only thing he worried about. It was a festive opening, it was a good party, I think a little subdued because of the circumstances. But it was – another thing – I think about these things in terms of the new installation where they have new ultraviolet filtering walls, which make differences in the light, but I think we had decided to have curtains. I know we had to have curtains in there anyway, which we used when the sun was coming in too strongly, and we realized at that first opening, which was in the evening, that we also needed in there at night the curtains drawn, because if you walked toward those curved windows in that lighted room, you looked like yourself coming at yourself in a funhouse mirror. And so there are always these little practical considerations in that – but that was one thing we learned. Oh, another thing we did that night – and I think this was sort of too hard to keep up – we put spotlights outside to light up the things so –

EB: – in the woodland?

BB: In the woodland, on the trees and things, so that they would outweigh the reflections. And I think that worked pretty well, but the keeping up of the spotlights was too much for later evenings, when it’s open for concert time and that sort of thing.

EB: There used to be bird cutouts in the woods.

BB: There was a problem with that glass corridor to the main building, because birds would try to fly through that glass, and they tried planting up around it, they tried – they were cutouts of hawks. They were trying to scare them, frighten them away from going through the glass. Yeah, that was a problem. Oh, there was another wildlife problem, and I meant to see what they’re doing now. But the first day I was in my office, there are these deep window wells, and there was a bird – I think it was a mocking bird – who got down in there, and who could not fly straight enough, long enough to get out. So, I called for help, and the gardeners came and put a ladder down in there, and the mocking bird simply flew up to one rung of the ladder and then flew off into the sky. So, they put little ladders in there; they were probably there when you were there. There was another time when a raccoon got down in there.

EB: I remember those squirrel – I used to call them “squirrel ladders.”

BB: No, they were put in really as bird ladders, but I guess the squirrels –

EB: Let’s take a little break. Do you mind?

BB: Fine. Can we break, Joe?

EB: Joe, we’re taking a break. [tape ends and then restarts]

EB: This is an interview with Elizabeth Benson, the second tape, May 13, 2008. I’m Elizabeth Boone. It’s being recorded by Joe Mills, and we’re in the Fellows Building of Dumbarton Oaks. Betty, we’ve talked about the first installation, we’ve talked about the opening. Certainly the collection did not remain static, but there were acquisitions and de-accessions–a few. So, I was wondering if you could talk about how you continued to acquire selectively and shaped the collection and what was your thinking about that.

BB: My basic rule of thinking was to ask myself, “Would Mr. Bliss like this piece?” Mr. Bliss had not acquired his objects with the idea of having an example of this thing and that thing and the other thing and all of the things that he should. He was interested in buying fine objects, usually of fine materials, finely worked. And this was the way he did things. So, I tried to keep that in mind. He had acquired very few ceramic pieces. And I began acquiring ceramics because this was the time when fine Maya ceramics were beginning to appear. There hadn’t been very many up until that time. So, that was one thing that I did. But I acquired other pieces that I thought, “He would like this, he would have bought this.” And again, we weren’t trying to do a sort of well-rounded thing, necessarily. It was nice if a good piece came up from a culture that we didn’t have well represented, and OK, that’s fine – but that’s more or less what we were doing.

EB: Someone described Mr. Bliss – and perhaps it was you – who described him as a “polished stone man” [BB laughs]. Maybe that was Gordon Willeyand I can’t remember.

BB: A few, yeah. There’s a Maya round polychrome bowl and there’s that carved creamy-colored clay bowl – that’s a round one too. There were a few that he had, but not many. We acquired most of them.

EB: How were your acquisitions funded?

BB: There was money – I’ve forgotten how much – in the budget for acquisitions. And sometimes that was fine. When we’d already spent some money and there was something that Mike and I thought was very good, and that we should have – he looked at everything that I got and we did this together. But if there wasn’t any money, I’d go to Jack Thacher and say, “We want to acquire this,” show him this piece, and he would go to Mrs. Bliss, I think – I never did that. I’d shown her a number of pieces that we wanted and she knew that I knew and so forth, but it was Thacher who made the arrangements for that. And there was one time – I think I only did this once – and I went to Thatcher and I said, “I want to buy this piece.” And he said, “Talk to Sue Boyd, she just was going to get a piece and somebody else got it ahead of her,” or something like that. It was near the end of the fiscal year. So I got Byzantine money for one piece.

EB: Did she want it back the next year?

BB: No, no, she was very good about it. We got on quite well. That was the only time I ever asked her for anything.

EB: So, Mrs. Bliss saw all the pieces that you acquired, or just a few?

BB: I think we showed her all of them probably, maybe it was more than just a few. We may not have showed her every single piece, but most pieces we did. She came over for tea almost every day, not absolutely, but usually. Tea was served every afternoon at Dumbarton Oaks in the good old days in the hall of the old house in the round part that looks out over the garden—in the hallway, the center of the hallway opposite the main front door. And she would very often come for tea and sit down at the tea table where the urnwas. We poured our own tea but she was sitting there. And so sometimes when she was here for that reason we would show her something at that time. And she came in at other times too.

EB: You mentioned showing her a mask.

BB: Yes, this was towards the end of her life – in one of her last illnesses – and she was in Sibley Hospital, and the late Maya mosaic mask was something we very much wanted. And she would have to get it for us. So Jack Thacher and I put it in a box, a shoebox, or a picnic basket or something, carefully wrapped with cloth and tissue paper, and carried it over. Jack had a very good driver named Albert, and Albert drove us very smoothly over to Sibley Hospital. And we took this into her room, and she was lying in the bed, and we showed her the mask. And as we were showing her this thing which she approved of and bought, a nurse came in. The poor nurse had never seen anything like this. What were we doing to her patient? – showing her this very scary strange thing.

EB: And it had canine teeth?

BB: Yes, but I guess nurses have seen everything along the lines – so she recovered pretty quickly. But we got the piece.

EB: Who were the principal dealers with whom – or the principal sources – from whom you acquired the material? Are there any that dealt in particular kinds of things more than others?

BB: That’s a good question. I’m not so sure about that. There were generally more Maya things around – at least, that were offered to us – I don’t know. Mr. Bliss had got things from Earl Stendhal and then his son Al Stendhal – we got occasionally something from him. Mr. Bliss had also dealt with John Wise who died shortly after I arrived – but I think we did get something from Wise. I don’t even remember from whom we got exactly all these things. But the dealers we dealt with mostly probably were Ed Merrin, Alphonse Jax, André Emmerich a little bit. Who else? We got a few things from John Stokes. That’s about it that I think of at the moment. Oh, I have to tell an Ed Merrin story. Ed Merrin brought something down to show us one day. I think it was a Maya vase. And he brought with him his young son who is now the head of the Merrin Gallery. And the kid was then about – his head was just above my desk level. And they – Ed came and sat across the desk from me and put this vase out, and the kid was standing there, and he said, “That cost $100.” And I said, “I’ll take it.” [laughs] And Ed – there was this momentary look of terror going across Ed Merrin’s face, you know –

EB: – because he was going to charge you much more.

BB: Oh, he was going to charge me enormously much more.

EB: Did you get it for $100?

BB: No, I did not. No, I relaxed him fairly quickly. But it was a moment that – I told Ed that story not too long ago.

EB: So, there was the sense that you had the funds to acquire within reason?

BB: Yeah, we didn’t have vast amounts but we could, if there was something.

EB: Were there any challenges – what were the major challenges to continuing to build a collection? I mean, were you in competition for works with other museums and individuals?

BB: Yeah, there of course were other people out there who were buying – many of them. I wasn’t – once at an auction, I was bidding against somebody who was bidding for me – Glassell, that’s the name of the Texas guy who built a big collection of mostly gold pieces. So, I was aware of him because he outbid me. But I think Rockefeller, of course, was collecting at that time, but I think he had his little world and we didn’t – there was no obvious competition there. And there were a lot of other people, but I was very rarely aware of kind of “so-and-so had seen that” or “so-and-so is going to get it away from us.”

EB: I am going to bring up the issue of cultural patrimony and how that affected collecting practices within Dumbarton Oaks and elsewhere. And maybe we could introduce a new – You are a member of a panel on the International Movement of National Art Treasures which was set up by the American Society of International Law in 1969–70. Can you tell us a little about this?

BB: Let me back up just slightly to your previous remark because that whole thing had not yet become a real issue when we were buying. Mr. Bliss always said that he never bought anything in the country of origin. And he did buy almost everything in New York, I think. He bought few things in Europe. But toward the end of the late ’60s, it was beginning to be obvious that this was going to be an issue. So that committee – that panel – was set up to advise the State Department lawyers who were then working on the treaty with Mexico and the UNESCO Convention. And that panel was interesting. Cliff Evans was on that, and he was very adamant. Clemency Coggins came on towards the end. She was not there at the beginning. And of course, those – Cliff may have died during that time. But there were lots of different kinds of opinions on this, and it was interesting what came out of the panel. Ernest Feidler,who was the General Counsel, I think, for the National Gallery at that time, I think he’s – no, or was he administrator – he was a lawyer, anyway. And he had previously had some experience with Chinese things, and somebody brought this thing that there should be certificates for everything that went out of a country. And Ernest Feidler said, “Look, they did that in China and all they did was create a large business in fake certificates.” So, many things of this kind came up – and the fact is that a lot of this thing is so much a part of the national economy of those countries. The little guy finds it and he gets some money from the guy who handles this, who gets some money from the guy who sells it to the dealer and – so, it was a very complex thing but it was fascinating and very interesting. But I could see that our buying days were just about over so – but we got some good things.

EB: Did the committee of Harvard museums or the consortium of Harvard museums have any impact on this?

BB: I didn’t exactly think of it that way, and I wasn’t so aware of those. But what I did realize was that Harvard was sort of watching us and was not going to let us do much after these things came into effect. I thought of it more in terms of their archaeological digging licenses, which was understandable, and we didn’t want to be lousing them up if they couldn’t get their licenses because we were buying objects. But that came really in 1970 on. But I’m sure that – that was certainly a part of it and it was part of our thinking.

EB: What about de-accessions? Did you –?

BB: I did very little of that, I think. There was something – I don’t remember what it was – but there was something that Earl Stendhal had sold Mr. Bliss, I think, shortly before Mr. Bliss died. And I can’t remember – I don’t remember what it was, whether –

EB: – mosaic mask with bad teeth –?

BB: Oh, there was that mosaic mask. Now, was that the Stendhal thing? That was one, yes.

EB: – bought by a woman some time ago and acquired later. I thought that was traded out for the little Maya mask, the mosaic mask.

BB: Well, there were a couple of things that we did trade out from it. I’m a little foggy on those. Because that Maya sculpture that is not very well carved – we’ve never shown it – it was downstairs. It can’t even be called a stele – it’s carved, it’s stone with rather faint carving on it. But it was real, at least, and we got that in exchange for something that was not real – or whether it was not real or whether it had been overworked later or whatever – but there were not many things of that kind, probably maybe three.

EB: Because there used to be a little cupboard downstairs. Well, not a little cupboard, but a cupboard where things were stored and there were a couple of trays –

BB: – in your office?

EB: – in your office, your office. There were a couple of trays, and I always just called it the “fakes cupboard.”

BB: Well, I guess they were questionable. What I remember that was – there were lots of jade beads and that kind of thing, which I think were perfectly good. But how do you install batches of jade beads? I think, you know, Mr. Bliss bought a big box of jade beads and took the best ones out for exhibition and the rest of them, I think, were OK. It was that kind of thing that was in there and there were some questionable objects, which I have happily forgotten.

EB: I have always found them fascinating, and even if they were fake, they were quite good – I mean, aesthetically.

BB: Yes.

EB: So, you didn’t de-accession very much.

BB: Not very much, no, no.

EB: Let’s talk a little about the kind of advice you got from Mike Coe on the collection. You worked really in collaboration – very closely with him. Is that correct?

BB: Yes. Well, Mike was a scholar in the field, which I was not at that point, really. I was beginning to be, I guess, but – Well, I called Mike fairly often about various things, and we worked together on all the accessions. We worked together on the installation – except that he was not here. He put in a good deal of information and then those of us who were here, did it, pretty much, without any more going on that. We worked together on the handbook that we put out at that time. And that was what we did in the early days.

EB: So, he would come down fairly often? Or –

BB: Well, it depended on what was going on and what the need was.

EB: It seems now you had what we would consider an extraordinary amount of freedom to kind of shape – and we’ll talk about the program later – to shape the collection and to essentially do what you wanted –

BB: I did, yes.

EB: – within reason and with advice and this and that. It must have been quite thrilling.

BB: I did, I did. We’ll talk about the Advisory Committee later, I guess, but I did use them for things that I was buying.

EB: So they advised – the Advisory Committee also advised on the purchases?

BB: Yes, because, Gordon Ekholm and Junius Bird at the Museum of Natural History in New York – they looked at things for all kinds of people. One covered Mexico and the other covered Peru. So, almost anything I bought, I would show to Gordon Ekholm, say, or I would call Gordon and say, “Have you see this thing that so-and-so has?” And he said, “Yes, I have and I think it’s good.” And I said, “OK.” Or I would traipse up to New York with this. So, we used these people in that way because I wanted to have as much backing as possible. And they were the two best people, really.

EB: I think we’re coming to an end of our discussion of the collection itself. Do you have any sense of where the collection stands in relation to other collections – private or public?

BB: It is smaller than a lot of collections, yet it’s big enough to be shown as an entity and as a thing with various kinds of things in it. It is a particularly fine collection, I think. It’s been collected from that point of view. And it has a kind of special character. It has most of the important kinds of things, but I think it’s a very kind of beautiful introduction to pre-Columbian art for people who haven’t seen it before – it’s the finest thing to see first. And also if you know pre-Columbian art, it’s a real treat, and it’s quite special in that way.

BB: And in some ways the Johnson gallery shares the same kind of character – characteristics – as the collection.

EB: I was just sort of thinking this as you were saying that because I think that the building is certainly part of the experience. And all together, it reflects the Blisses’ tastes and interests and ability to do the kind of thing that meant something to them and to other people.

BB: Thank you. Do you have any other thoughts you want to add?

EB: Not at the moment.

BB: It’s a good way to end.

EB: Thank you very much.

BB: Thank you. Thank you, Joe. [tape ends and then restarts]

EB: This is an interview with Elizabeth Benson. My name is Elizabeth Boone. It’s May 16, 2008. We’re taping in the Fellows Building at Dumbarton Oaks. Betty, let’s talk today, or begin talking, about the scholarly program in Pre-Columbian Studies. Was Mr. Bliss himself interested in establishing the scholarly program – or a scholarly program?

BB: Of course, I never talked about the Pre-Columbian scholarly program with Mr. Bliss, because he had died by the time I came to Dumbarton Oaks. But judging from the history of the Byzantine collection and center for studies, I think he would have been quite delighted – and also from his interest in pre-Columbian things. But I think he was rather proud of the fact that the Byzantine center here became Harvard’s center for Byzantine studies and a very serious thing. And he was indeed interested in pre-Columbian studies, and I – still, I think I talked about this a little bit before – but I think he and Mrs. Bliss deliberately collected things that were open for scholarly research, that a great deal had not been done in, so they were rather new and wide-open fields.

EB: Can you characterize the field of pre-Columbian studies at the time that you started this program?BB: It was a very small field at that time. I think I emphasized before Mr. Bliss’s interest in pre-Columbian objects as art, and there were a few art historians who were still in training – in school, but up to that time, really, George Kubler was about the only art historian who was involved in pre-Columbian things. He was more involved in colonial, but he certainly had considerable interest in the pre-Columbian world. So, it was a field that was just beginning to come along, I think.

EB: How did the program begin? Was it a conference, a fellowship, or publications, or –

BB: I think I can say it began when I asked Mike Coe if he would give the first public lecture at Dumbarton Oaks, and he said, yes, he would, if I would publish it.

EB: Oh, really.

BB: So began the publishing program, and that was the first issue of Dumbarton Oaks Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology.

EB: And how soon was this after you came, or after the collection was installed?

BB: I think it was probably within the year. I don’t remember the exact date.

EB: Do you – did you have a sense from the beginning, did you have a sense of a mission, or –?

BB: I guess at some level I did. I don’t exactly think of it that way because things simply began to develop, and I got more and more interested and more involved. And there became more things that might be done, and I think I did – I certainly realized that this was something that was quite new then, and so, in that sense, yes.

EB: And maybe we should talk a little bit about the conferences. The first conference was the Dumbarton Oaks conference on the Olmec. How did the conferences begin?

BB: The conferences –

EB: Did you have a goal, and why?

BB: I didn’t have a goal, but Mike Coe was working on the Olmec site at San Lorenzo, and Robert Heizer and California people, from the University of California, were working at La Venta, and these were two major Olmec sites. And also at that time, carbon-14 had just come into being, and there were still people at the time of that Olmec conference who thought that Olmec was later than Maya. And so it was exactly the right moment to have that conference, and I think that was the main reason – not to start a series of conferences, really, but just to catch that moment and talk about it.

EB: How big – could you characterize it for us as a conference? Because my sense is that it was very different from the kind of conferences that are held today.

BB: Yeah. I had the idea – of course, again, the field was much smaller than it is now – but I had the idea that all of the people in the audience – we had an invited audience – should know just about as much about the subject as the people who were giving the papers. And I built in long discussion periods, which we taped, and we published several of those. I think that was – it was a problem to get somebody to transcribe the tape – but we published the Olmec one, and we published, I think, several later ones, and some good material came out in those published discussion periods. But that was my idea in having the small meeting, and of course, as I say, the field was so much smaller then, it was easier to do than it would be now.

EB: So this was a small group of invited scholars.

BB: Right. They were all invited. I did that all along.

EB: Was there a sense that this, the first conference, would be the beginning of a series, or –?

BB: Well, this was interesting, because John Thacher, the director, wrote a preface for the Olmec volume, and he said in it, mentioned something about the first pre-Columbian conference at Dumbarton Oaks, and he sent a copy to Derek Bok, the President of Harvard, just to sort of let him know –

EB: It was Pusey.

BB: Oh, I’m sorry! I’m sorry. Dear! Nathan Pusey. I’m thinking ahead.

EB: Derek Bok was later – he was a professor at Harvard for so long.

BB: No, well he came into our picture later on, but it was Nathan Pusey at that time, and Thacher sent this preface to sort of let President Pusey know what was going on, and the only comment that Pusey had was that – did we really want to call it the first conference because we might not have another one. Well, as you know as well as I do, that every year since 1965 or 6, we have had a pre-Columbian conference, and they’ve all sooner or later been published.

EB: The second conference was on Chavin. Was there a reason that that was selected? Did you see that as a – in comparison with the Olmec?

BB: Yeah, it was a good comparison with the Olmec, because it was contemporary with the Olmec, in Peru, and also there was work going on at Chavin, which was revealing a lot of new information about Chavin. Richard Lumbreras [sic: Luís G. Lumbreras] was working there, and we invited him to speak. He didn’t come – I think he had political reasons for not wanting to come – but Hernán Amat came, and that was more of a problem of getting papers for that conference than for others. But it worked well, I think. It was a good balance for Olmec and sort of a logical thing to do after Olmec, I think.

EB: It’s interesting that the Chavin conference never had the impact on the field that the Olmec one – well, well I say that as a Mesoamericanist – but certainly the Olmec conference was so fundamental to the development of Olmec studies.

BB: Well I think it was, and it was in large part because of the timing. It was just a critical moment in those studies, and there’s also something else about those meetings, in particular the Olmec one. We set that up, and I think the others too, for all day Saturday, and several people responded and said, “Yes, I would like to come, and if there’s any time, I would like to talk about something I’ve been working on.” So, Sunday morning became the volunteer paper session, and we taped those, as well as the discussion periods, and one thing – one paper in the Olmec Conference, I think, is probably one of the most significant papers, and that was Peter Furst’s were-jaguar paper, which had a tremendous impact on a lot of people, so it was not only the importance of archaeology, but some of these slightly side issues. And that was something I liked to do, and the thing I was doing anyway, was to do not just straight archaeology, but to concentrate on things that would reveal something about the art, for one thing. But this could come from all sorts of sources, and it could come often from ethnography, so I liked to think about bringing in a many-faceted kind of work.

EB: I’m trying to remember the first – I think the first conference I ever attended was the Late Post-Classic Central Mexico one in ’78, and I think there were still Sunday morning volunteer papers.

BB: Uh-huh. I think we did that straight through. At first it sort of happened – it happened by accident, but then we kind of planned it. And people knew about it and could come in, yeah.

EB: Did you have problems with people – because it was always invitational – did you have – how did you deal with the issue of people wanting to come and there not being room or their not having a sufficient scholarly background or interest, or –?

BB: There was very little problem with that. Once or twice people who wanted to come – and you know, you just have to handle that as it comes, but there wasn’t very much of that. I should mention that these things did not always go perfectly smoothly. The Chavin conference – I invited a number of people – there were people who either didn’t approve of each other professionally or had had some personal problems, and I thought, “Oh, my Lord, what have I gotten into? What’s going to happen?” And I had a very pregnant assistant at that time and I said, “Penny, if these people start throwing things at each other, I’m going to put you in the middle.” But I counted on the civilized environment of Dumbarton Oaks, and everybody behaved beautifully.

EB: Were the conferences always in the Music Room?

BB: The conferences were always in the Music Room. I think I mentioned – I guess there was one – because one year when the Byzantine books were being moved around because they were building new shelving for them. And they were in the Music Room, and what I remember is not so much the conferences, although I think we actually held those also in the Orangerie, in the Garden. And I had checked out there that there was indeed sufficient electricity coming in and there was heat and we would be all right there in October. And what I remember about this is that Junius Bird gave the public lecture just before the meeting the night before or the afternoon before, and it had to be night because it had to be dark for him to be in the Orangerie and show slides, and the bats came out in the ceiling of the Orangerie, and it was quite wonderful to have these bats flying around, and Junius loved it, and it was good.

EB: So did the first conference also have a public lecture at the beginning because it was the Saturday conference and then the Friday public lecture. I was wondering when that started.

BB: I think that started – I’m not absolutely sure it was the first conference, but we certainly did that quite regularly, at least after that.

EB: Now you had conferences in October, always in October, and was it for a particular reason, or –?

BB: It simply seemed to be a good time. For one thing, the Byzantine symposium was in May, and the Garden one was in the spring, and it seemed nicer to balance it out in the fall, and also the fall seemed to be a good time to get people in this field together. That seemed to work well. We started out having them the last weekend in October, and after we’d had a few of these, I realized that the gardeners by that time had already put all the plants in the Orangerie for the winter, and they had to get them out again so that we could have luncheon there, so I moved it up to the weekend before, and then they could just put the plants in once.

EB: Now one conference – the joint conference with the Textile Museum, the Junius Bird textile conference – was in May, and that was an extra.

BB: That was an extra, that was, yeah. Yes, that was not in the regular series.

EB: Was that held here?

BB: I think that was held in both places. I think part of it was here and part there.

EB: Did you have other smaller gatherings, round tables, or –? Actually, the conferences themselves were fairly small.

BB: The conferences themselves were fairly small. I didn’t have any regular or irregular roundtable things. The one thing that I did do was after the first Palenque roundtable that Merle Greene Robertson organized in late ’73 – that was a very exciting meeting, because Floyd Lounsbury was a Fellow here, and he and I went down there together. He had not really – he had just begun to look at the inscriptions on monuments. He’d been working with the codices, and down there he got together with Linda Schele, who was quite new in the field but had been working on these things, and Peter Mathews, a student of Dave Kelley’s at Calgary – he was then an undergraduate at Calgary – and the three of them worked on this and got the first Palenque king list, which was –

EB: Here at Dumbarton Oaks?

BB: No, this was in Palenque, at Merle Greene Robertson’s house. And that was a small meeting too. And so I was keyed up by that, and toward the end of the year, I had some extra money in the fund, in the fiscal year, and I decided that I would try to get together all the people who had worked on the Palenque inscriptions, and those people came, plus Dave Kelley, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff, who had done some very important work with inscriptions at other sites. She was really one of the first people to start working on this kind of thing. She was the first person. And that meeting did not go well at all. I hadn’t structured it, and Tania sort of looked at this young whippersnapper, Linda Schele, across the table from her, and – that didn’t go, and not much got said, and the next day I said to Floyd, “We’ve got to structure this” – Floyd Lounsbury was here. And so it was a little better Sunday morning. And then many people went home, and the others who hadn’t booked early planes or were staying the night were sort of talking two by two or looking at books or something, and all of a sudden they were all down on the floor by a copy of Maudsley, and they got a new glyph, and each one of them knew or saw something that the others didn’t. And I thought, “This is why I did this.”

EB: So who were those people down on the floor?

BB: This was Dave Kelley and Floyd Lounsbury and Linda Schele and Peter Mathews. And I got them together several other times, and then they started getting themselves together. But those were the only mini-meetings I had.

EB: There were a series of meetings, weren’t there?

BB: Yeah, I don’t remember exactly how many times I got them, but whenever a moment seemed right, I would do this again. And Dave Kelley was in Europe on a sabbatical, and he flew back for the weekend for this meeting, and he walked in the door a few minutes later, and Linda said, “We’ve just decided that this glyph is such and such,” and Dave said, “I want to know why each of you thinks that.” They were won – this is why they worked together so wonderfully. They were absolutely open, and it was great. And I think it did help the field along.

EB: Because that really was the moment when the breakthroughs in Maya epigraphy began, wasn’t it?

BB: Yes, it was just about then, yeah.

EB: And so Dumbarton Oaks – you were the catalyst for it.

BB: Well, they would have gotten somewhere anyway, because it was beginning, but I think these meetings did help, and we did get some new material and a little more impetus.

EB: So Floyd was a Fellow here. Was Linda ever a Fellow?

BB: Yes, yes.

EB: And Peter Mathews?

BB: Peter was never a Fellow, no, no.

EB: Maybe we should talk about the fellowship program. How did – since we talked about Floyd Lounsbury being a Fellow – how did this program begin? Or did it begin as a program?

BB: Well, I think we looked around, and I thought, “The Byzantines have Fellows and the Garden people have Fellows, and maybe we should have” – I didn’t say Fellows, I think, at first, because I couldn’t figure out where we could put one Fellow, in the space outside my office that later got enclosed, but that was open before we put a desk there.

EB: Oh, so it was that wide space, what I call the wide space in the hall.

BB: Yeah. It was a room-sized hall. And so when the Advisory Committee met that fall, we told them that we thought we would like to have a Fellow, and this – we didn’t have anybody in mind; we hadn’t done anything about this, and Gordon Ekholm got up and said, “Well, I don’t mean to push this, but my son-in-law has just finished his doctorate, and he’s working on Teotihuacan murals.” And this was Arthur Miller, and he was our first Fellow. And that’s how he got there.

EB: Is it? That’s very interesting. I didn’t know that.

BB: Yeah, so –

EB: But of course the topic was perfect for Dumbarton Oaks.

BB: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

EB: And –

BB: Sometimes we – the next year – I’m not sure how those people came, and I think they had heard about it – and it was Kano, from Japan. I think he got here or found out about it because Seiichi Izumi had been here; he had been working at Kotosh, and he was here for the Chavin conference, so he knew about Dumbarton Oaks. And I think that Kano, Chiaki Kano, knew it from that way. And the other person was Jeff Wilkerson, and I’m not sure whether he inquired, or whether there was some special reason for him.

EB: Where was he trained? Was he Harvard?

BB: Wilkerson? He was Tulane.

EB: Oh, pardon me. For some reason I thought he was Harvard.

BB: I’m pretty sure he was Tulane. I can check that. And then the next year we invited Floyd Lounsbury. So sometimes –

EB: Oh I see. He came as a Visiting Scholar.

BB: He came as a Visiting Scholar.

EB: And Joyce Marcus was here as a Junior Fellow.

BB: Yes, she was just finishing her doctorate. And she came – I’m sure she found out about it through Gordon Willey. She was a student of Gordon’s.

EB: Did you have a sense of the fellow – did you see the fellowships as being targeted to a particular, let’s say, interest demographic, or specific areas of interest or disciplines?

BB: I wanted them to have something to do with the art, which could be almost anything, and otherwise I think we simply wanted good and interesting people who would produce some good work. And we hoped that some things they could do we would publish, and we did do that, occasionally, at least. They were often working on something bigger than we were doing. But we didn’t have the specific thing in mind.

EB: How were the Fellows chosen, I mean, once the program was up and running?

BB: Well, for a while, it was – I think there were people who found out about it and applied. I don’t think we did much in the way of any kind of public announcement, and sometimes it was an invitational thing. The year that – there was, Linda Schele – it doesn’t show there, but she may not have had a fellowship – but she was here at one time when Floyd was here, but then she was back. She was here as a proper Fellow when Robert Rands was here because she was working on the Palenque. Well, she had been working with the excavation people at Palenque, and she did that book that we published on the contents of the storerooms at Palenque, and she may have been working on that when Rands was here, because he was working with the Palenque ceramics.

EB: So they were both here.

BB: They were both here at the same time. And that was an invitation thing.

EB: Now before that Rosemary Sharp at the time was a Bliss Fellow. I don’t – does that mean anything?

BB: Well, I noticed in the list that Joanne gave me that several people had Bliss Fellow, and I had never heard that before. We had essentially Junior Fellows and Senior Fellows and Visiting Scholars, and it’s fine to call them a Bliss Fellow, and maybe that’s – I don’t know when – that must have come in at a certain time, but that was new to me.

EB: So the Fellows were housed in what we used to call the Pre-Columbian basement? I mean, their offices were there.

BB: Yeah. I think once, at least once, we used a spare study in the Garden Library wing, when they had extra room. And then when Bob Van Nice, who had been in charge of the Santa Sofia project and had that big room in which they had been doing big drawings of Santa Sofia—he finished that project. We got that space eventually, which housed Fellows. I guess there was space for three Fellows in there in addition to the Library stacks. And we also got the room in the northeast corner on the other side of the Pre-Columbian Library, which the coin people had used before, so we put Fellows in there. So gradually we found room for them, but at the beginning, it was limited.

EB: You really had almost no space.

BB: That’s true, yeah.

EB: You mentioned – and this is regressing a little bit; we’re talking about space – you mentioned when you first arrived at Dumbarton Oaks some of the Byzantinists coming in to see you.

BB: Oh, I was amused, because I had just come into this office, our desk was on order – I think my desk was something like a door on sawhorses at that point – and I had just come into this strange world, and I looked up, and here were these three rather exotic-looking faces in the doorway. One was Romilly Jenkins, who was a Byzantine professor here and later was Director of Studies after Ernst Kitzinger, and one was a tall Danish man – I don’t remember his name – and the other was a wonderful Welshman, who became a very good friend, who – his name was John St. Bodfan Gruffydd, and he had a – I think it was a Jaguar – sports car, which he used to leave open, so that people could look at it, because it was a treasure. He wore a Sherlock Holmes hat when he was driving in this thing, and he was a marvelous character, a delightful person – but there he was welcoming me. They were looking very curious about what was going on in that room.

EB: Where were the Fellows housed?

BB: The Fellows – there was an apartment house up the hill near the Russian Embassy that was where Dumbarton Oaks rented apartments for Fellows for many years. Yes, and even occasionally people would stay in this building, in the Fellows Building.

EB: So when Arthur Miller came, was he – were there apartments up there then, or –?

BB: I think he was up there then, yeah. Yeah.

EB: Did the Pre-Columbian Fellows give research reports or informal talks?

BB: No, there wasn’t that. That hadn’t started yet. I think it was Giles Constable who started that.

EB: And what was there – can you say something about the relationship to the fellowship program in Pre-Columbian vis-à-vis the other fellowship programs? BB: By and large, they usually stay pretty much to themselves, in my experience. There’ve been a couple of examples. Richard Townsend, who was working on that Aztec garden site, got along very well with the Garden Fellows and liked to talk to them about this project, and that was a nice rapport. The most interesting person, I think, was Sabine MacCormack, who came here as a Byzantine Fellow – and I don’t remember exactly what it was, whether it was Mission to the Slavs, but it was about the conversion to Christianity and how that was happening—and she came here and realized that a very similar thing was going on in the New World. And she started looking very carefully at the Andean sources on this. And she’s written two books on conversion and Christianity, the relation between Christianity and the indigenous religions. She’s published those since then on the New World. That was the only real crossover.

EB: It is interesting how Dumbarton Oaks becomes a – well, it provides an opportunity for people and issues to go in very interesting ways.

BB: Yes, yes.

EB: So, did all of the Fellows have lunch together or did they just go their own way or how did that work?

BB: Well –

EB: Because I know now lunch is such a big part of what Dumbarton Oaks is, and I don’t know whether it always was –

BB: It probably –

EB: – or whether they did sherries or teas where the Fellows got together or not.

BB: I think that the lunch may be more of a real social occasion now than it was. That space is small in that dining room here, and you tended to go with your own people, but you also filled in at other tables. Somebody was saying the other day that there was more mixture when people ate here, because the space was small and the tables filled in. As long as Mrs. Bliss was alive, there was tea served. Did I mention this the other day?

EB: No. Well, you did, but let’s talk about it.

BB: Yeah. In the Main House, in the center of the hall, in the, where the curved glass is opposite the old front door, there was a table, and in the afternoons at four o’clock, I think, there was a tea urn.

EB: Every afternoon?

BB: I think it was every afternoon during the week. And Mrs. Bliss would often come to that and have tea with the Fellows and people. And it was a good chatting time for people; that was a good social time. The swimming pool was a good social place. I think I knew more people from the Byzantine center from swimming with them than other ways.

EB: There used to be sherry served before lunch –

BB: There was sherry served –

EB: – or was that in the afternoons?

BB: Now I suddenly remember that there was sherry, but I’ve forgotten exactly when it was. Was it regular or was it special? I think it was sort of special occasion, wasn’t it?

EB: I think it may have been a Thursday sherry hour.

BB: That’s right, there was one day of the week, that’s right. That was it, yes. Yeah.

EB: So did Mrs. Bliss interact very much with the Fellows?

BB: Not a whole lot, but she liked to meet them and talk to them a little bit and be nice with them.

EB: The Fellows program naturally leans into the Library. How did the Library begin?

BB: The Library began with Mr. Bliss. He had a library, a small one, but he had some good things in it. And it was in a building behind the house where the Blisses lived in their last years, a house at Q and 28th, and behind the house there was a garden, a small garden, with a wonderful – I think it was a beech tree in the middle of it – and the other side of it was probably, what, an old carriage house, that was Mr. Bliss’s office. And the library was there. And he had – what did he have? – maybe 500 books, something like that. And it was a good start on a library.

EB: So did the library come here?

BB: The library came here.

EB: When the collection came here?

BB: Yes, yeah, yeah.

EB: So, the Fellows didn’t go to Mrs. Bliss’s house to consult books or anything?

BB: Well, this was only pre-Columbian in Mr. Bliss’s library, and it came here before we had Fellows.

EB: Oh, I see, of course.

BB: So, yeah.

EB: And then how did you – clearly you built the Library – what were your goals? What kind of library were you trying to create?

BB: Well, I was trying to create a library that would be useful to people working in the more-worked-with and higher cultures in Latin America, and I was trying to fill in gaps in Mr. Bliss’s library, which just for this kind of thing that would be good to have. And also, of course, things were beginning to come to be published, and to get the new material that was coming. So that was, those two things.

EB: Would you say you had the sort of financial support to acquire the way you wanted to?

BB: For books, yes, I think so, yeah, yeah. No, because I could – I don’t remember now what the figure was, but I dreamed up a figure that I thought would be a good figure, and that was –

EB:Those were the good old days.

BB: Those were the good old days.

EB: Did you ever – were there ever plans to acquire manuscripts or unique materials, or was it always a –?

BB: Not really, no, no. We acquired useful books and objects.

EB: Now you talked about the publications and how the study series began as a publication of Mike Coe’s lecture, but were the other studies, in the monograph series – Studies in Pre-Columbian Art & Archaeology – how did that develop?

BB: Well, we had started the series, so we had to keep going with it, and we – there were some things. Well, the early papers I guess – George Kubler produced one – they were sometimes on things in the Collection or by people on the Advisory Committee. And then we just gradually, of course, widened, widened fairly quickly, with the people wanting to have us publish things.

EB: Now there’s – in the studies series – there’re several – there’re many – fundamental publications.

BB: Yeah, yeah.

EB: And the conferences – the publications of the symposia volumes – or actually, you didn’t call them “symposia,” but the conference volumes?

BB: Yeah. No, when we were trying to name our series, Byzantium had a symposium. I think the Garden people had, I believe, a colloquium, so I decided that we should have something else, so we had conferences. And then of course having them, we should – we wanted to publish them.

EB: Let’s talk a little bit about your – the advisors, the Advisory Committee. How did that first begin, and how were the members selected?

BB: I don’t actually know, because they were in place when I arrived.

EB: Oh, they were. OK.

BB: But I think that Jack Thacher, the Director, probably talked mostly with Sam Lothrop, and probably with Gordon Willey, and the people at Harvard, to get their advice on how this should be done. The other centers had advisory committees.

EB: So, Gordon Willey was on the advisory body continually, was he not?

BB: Well, those first people – Lothrop died shortly after that, after he was appointed, after that was formed. The others simply stayed, and I had thought that they were just appointed without end, but I noticed in looking through some of those old D.O. books the other day, it says they were reappointed yearly, but they were – there was nobody else on that committee until Stephen Williams became – he went to the Peabody, and I think it was probably the moment he became Director of the Peabody that he became a member, or ex officio, of that committee.

EB: So, Joe Brew was on because he was Director of the Peabody?

BB: Yeah, and he was the Chairman, yeah.

EB: And Junius Bird was at Natural History?

BB: At Natural History, as was Gordon Ekholm.

EB: So, the only – well, Samuel Lothrop and George Kubler –

BB: Kubler was Yale.

EB: On the first committee?

BB: Yeah.

EB: Did they really give advice?

BB: Yeah. No, they really did. And I would – actually, our meetings were usually more or less a formality. And just – we would tell them what we had been doing and what we wanted to. But I called them for various reasons – I called Joe Brewer, Gordon Willey for something, for some tactical advice. And the two at the American Museum, Gordon Ekholm and Junius Bird, I would show them objects that I wanted to acquire, because they both looked at objects, and if I wanted to buy a Maya thing, I would call Gordon and say, “Have you seen this?” And often he would say, “Yes, I have, and I think it’s very good, and I think you should try to get it,” or he would say no, and I would take it up to New York and show it to him. Or the dealer would say, “Gordon has seen this.”

EB: This is Gordon Ekholm.

BB: Yeah, yes. So I used both of the Natural History people in this way, and they were all useful in various ways.

EB: Did they choose the Fellows? Was there a formal review process?

BB: We began – we slowly worked into that. I think we essentially chose the Fellows – we being Mike Coe and Jack Thacher and me – chose the people we wanted. But I think before we did anything or let them know, we would go to the Advisory Committee and say, “These are the people we would like to have. Is this OK with you?”

EB: So, Jack Thacher was a critical voice in the developing fellowship program.

BB: Well, he was a great backer-upper. He didn’t do anything about choosing the people, but if Mike and I thought this was good, he backed us. But then, I say, Gordon Ekholm suggested Arthur Miller. What was her name? There was one person who was a student of Gordon’s, and I really didn’t think that she was all that good, but Gordon wanted her, and so –

EB: Rosemary Sharp.

BB: Rosemary Sharp. So we did take her in, but that’s – but by and large, we decided with their – we asked for their approval.

EB: And so Mike Coe had been – was – his title was advisor, and then you had an Advisory Committee, but he was a hands-on advisor? They were more –

BB: Yeah. I will say also, which I guess is obvious, that when we were thinking about somebody who’d applied, we would talk to that person’s professor or to other people who knew the work of that person, so we got – and often it was somebody on the Advisory Committee.

EB: Was George Kubler helpful? I mean, I shouldn’t put it that way. But I was thinking of the Advisory Committee – he was one of the few art historians.

BB: He was the only art historian on the committee. George had spoken interestingly and was interested in what we did and was helpful in some ways. He was not the sort of practical or how-to-do-it kind of person, and he was not useful in this sort of way.

EB: I can see that – I mean, I can see exactly, when you say that, I understand exactly what you mean.

BB: Yeah, that’s right.

EB: There is an abstract quality –

BB: Yes, exactly, yes.

EB: Whereas Mike Coe has an abstract quality, but also a hands-on, practical –

BB: Yeah, yeah. Well, this was – as did the other members. Joe Brew was not really – he was in North American art, North American archaeology. And he was – but he was good for certain “should we do this kind of thing?” questions, and when it came to things that had to do with what one should do in a museum – on that Joe would be good for certain advice.

EB: In the early years – and this was just a perception of mine, and maybe it’s that – the program seemed closer to Yale than to Harvard, because of the advice of Mike Coe. But I’m wondering, was there ever a move by Harvard to try to move the Pre-Columbian program up there at all?

BB: Yeah. Well, let me address the two parts of this, because I never felt any particular closeness – Yale was a nice and pleasant place, but I didn’t see that it had anything to do with us – except for Mike particularly, George a little bit – but we were certainly much more aware of Harvard. There was a time when Steve Williams came to the Peabody and on this committee, and I have absolutely no provable knowledge of this – everything came secondhand – but apparently he did think that, you know, “Why was all this stuff down here? They could use that in the Peabody and wouldn’t have to have all this expensive maintaining.” I think he was just after the pre-Columbian things, not the whole thing, although that may possibly have been discussed – should things be moved to Cambridge. For one thing, I think speaking of why that couldn’t be done, it’d be against the wishes of the donor. And that would be rather hard to do legally, and there would be a lot of legal and practical problems about any kind of thing like that, but – but apparently Steve Williams would talk to people in Cambridge about this, and the word would get down here one way or another – you know, fifth hand by that time – and so we would hear what he was planning to bring up at an Advisory Committee meeting. And then Mike and I – Mike and I usually had lunch with Gordon Willey before those meetings, and I guess we would get all this sort of arranged as to what the answers should be and how this should be handled. And so it never went anywhere. It may not have been very real in the beginning. There must have – there was some germ there, but it – but that was the only threat that I ever heard of.

EB: Reflecting back, and I guess this is sort of my final question, and there may be other things you want to bring out, but reflecting back on the beginning, and then, say, now, what is your view of the relation between the Pre-Columbian program at Dumbarton Oaks and the larger field of Pre-Columbian studies? I realize that’s a big, opened-up question.

BB: That’s a big one.

EB: And very interesting.

BB: Well, I feel that it’s a part of that bigger thing. The field has grown so, and it’s – at the beginning this was – it was important, because there wasn’t a whole lot of similar kind of activity going on. A number of people had been digging in that – well, not a whole lot of people, but certain universities had been digging in these sites – but it was not – the whole field of study has become bigger, certainly in this country, and it’s become more important to the countries in which it’s taking place, for touristic, money reasons, if nothing else, and also, I think, for increased awareness of national identity and national pride. But I think that Dumbarton Oaks does have a kind of special attitude in the field, and I think it can make contributions in that way that aren’t easily found in other places, which are maybe doing more excavation, possibly more publishing, but I think that the Dumbarton Oaks quality and the way they’re doing things is special and is also a part of the bigger thing.

EB: Are there questions that weren’t asked?

BB: Ah.

EB: Questions that you weren’t asked.

BB: I can’t think of any at the moment, no.

EB: Thank you very much.

BB: Thank you.

EB: The program remains extraordinarily important and special.

BB: Well, I’m just – I’m delighted that it’s livelier all the time. You know, there are a great quantity of Fellows, and that it has a vigor and a life, and much of that is due to you and your continuing efforts in this, and thank you.

EB: Thank you very much. [Tape ends and then restarts.]

BB: OK?

EB: Are you ready for us?

BB: Um-hum.

EB: OK. Matthew Stirling was one of Mr. Bliss’s advisors, but he’s not listed as being on the Advisory Committee. Could you talk about his importance for Dumbarton Oaks?

BB: Matthew Stirling had been at the Smithsonian. He had done important excavations – some of the earliest excavations – the earliest excavations – in the Olmec region. He was elderly at the time that the Collection was installed here. He did come to the Olmec conference, and he gave a paper at the Olmec conference. And in fact, there was film, I think, that we showed, that the Smithsonian had done of him. After the Olmec conference and after, I think, also, the following year, while they were still in that house, before he died, they would have a party for the people who were involved in the conference.

EB: Did they live in town?

BB: They lived in town. They lived in Cleveland Park, which is not terribly far away from here. And so that was a very nice way that they were participating in this. But I think Matthew Stirling would have been more important had he been younger and healthier. But he had been important in his day because Mr. Bliss, of course, loved Olmec. I mean, his first piece having been Olmec. And he always liked Olmec things.

EB: – and the first conference –

BB: Incidentally, I found some correspondence having to do with the Olmec exhibition at the National Gallery a few years ago in which somebody in Mexico was saying that I, who was on that committee for that show, had bought a lot of Olmec objects. And I didn’t. It was Mr. Bliss who bought a lot of Olmec objects. I think I bought maybe two. But I was being chastised slightly for that. But Mr. Bliss’ love was Olmec, parentheses there.

EB: Now support for archaeological projects: certainly the Byzantine program had been supporting archaeology for years; I don’t know whether in Landscape Architecture they also had been supporting work. Was there a sense that Pre-Columbian should or should not move into this area?

BB: We had one venture into this area, and I think that some possible thing seemed too complicated to take on or inappropriate for us to take on. But we did back one project of Arthur Miller’s, wanting to record the mural paintings at Tulum. He and I had both been in there with tour groups and seeing people with – there’s one very narrow space behind or below the pyramid where there are paintings and where people were walking through and you could hardly help rubbing against these paintings as you passed through. Nobody was trying to do them any harm. So we both felt strongly that these should be recorded. And so we did set up a project, and Arthur got Felipe Dávalos, who was a very good artist and used to doing that kind of thing. And we recorded those paintings which at the moment are hanging in the installation – or some of them are.

EB: And if you go to Tulum now, there’s nothing to be seen.

BB: I haven’t been in there recently. Yeah, I can imagine that. And that’s why we did it.

EB: So, that’s one of those –

BB: That was a rescue operation or a –

EB: – one of those things was absolutely short ontime. The program had an early focus on art history – or seems to have had – even though I know one of the first Fellows – Junior Fellows – Jeff Wilkerson is an archaeologist, and of course, Marcus is an archaeologist. But there was this sense that the program should focus on objects, as you say, or on images. But did you feel that there was a tension between a focus on art history or the art object versus anthropological archaeology or anthropology?

BB: There was a kind of basic enemy camp attitude between art historians and anthropologists. In some ways, I think a little more so now because they’ve learned to live together a little better. But at that time, these were two different worlds. But I used to feel that whatever we did, it should, hopefully, explain the art in some way. And there were all kinds of ways of doing this. It didn’t have to be art history. And I always liked to get somebody – at least one person – into those conferences who came from a sort of different world, who was an ethnographer – one ethnographer – or somebody who was a little offbeat and would look at things from a slightly different way. And I liked to get a blend of attitudes. So I liked to mix them up. But you are right that there is – was – this kind of, well, “That’s an art historian.” And there are people with that attitude. But I think that the really bright and lively, intelligent people can see how things belong together and how it all adds up.

EB: It seems that perhaps the camps aren’t enemy camps so much as they were at a bitter moment in the past.

BB: I think that’s true. I think that the archaeologists got in there first. They had not been in there for a very long time but they were in there first and they were dirt archaeologists and they went on a dig. And suddenly these art historians came along interpreting things and talking about iconography. And I think that for some of them that was enlightening and that was interesting. And for others of them, it was all, “They’re just art historians. They don’t know anything. They don’t know how dig.” But it depends on the person.

Dumbarton Oaks houses the extraordinary art collection begun by Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss. In this book the museum publishes the specialist collections in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, along with examples from the Blisses’ superb European collection, for the first time.

The publication of this new guidebook coincides with the complete refurbishment of Dumbarton Oaks and the creative reinstallation of the galleries. The curators offer highlights of the collection, accompanied by a lucid and thought-provoking text. Dumbarton Oaks—The Collections is intended as a valuable resource and a pleasure to read for scholars and nonspecialists alike.

Andean Art at Dumbarton Oaks presents the Andean portion of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art. It superbly illustrates all 133 Andean objects in color plates, and includes many complementary and comparative black-and-white illustrations and drawings. The body of Pre-Columbian art that Robert Bliss carefully assembled over a half-century between 1912 and 1963, and which has been amplified slightly since his death, is a remarkably significant collection. These works of art are among the finest examples of the visual arts produced by Andean cultures.

This Andean volume is the first in a series of four catalogues that will treat the entirety of the Bliss Pre-Columbian collection; the others planned will focus on objects from eastern Mesoamerica (Olmec and Maya), western Mesoamerica (Teotihuacan, Veracruz, Mixtec, and Aztec), and Lower Central America.

Andean Art is composed of five topical essays, shorter essays on the Andean cultures represented in the collection, and discussions of the individual objects. These were written by specialists in Pre-Columbian art, presenting the latest in scholarly thinking on Andean cultures and the objects. All thirteen authors bring broad perspectives from Andean culture history, archaeology, and art history to their contributions, but they focus their attentions primarily on the objects themselves, in order to provide meaningful contexts for them and to highlight how these objects, as works of art created and used purposefully, reveal special qualities of Andean culture.

The reader is provided with a fine sense of how the creators and original owners of the pieces in the Bliss collection used and valued these artworks on many levels. The authors also place individual objets alongside others of their type in so far as possible. An extraordinary feature of this volume is the technical descriptions of the metal objects provided by metals specialist Heather Lechtman.

“Through creative organization, excellent production, and above all the high quality of its contributors, this volume transcends the usual restrictions of format and content placed on catalogues. In this ambitious work, Dumbarton Oaks has presented a remarkably significant collection from the finest examples of Andean visual arts.” Journal of Anthropological Research

Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks presents the Olmec portion of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art. It illustrates all thirty-nine Olmec art objects in color plates and includes many complementary and comparative black-and-white illustrations and drawings. The body of Pre-Columbian art that Robert Bliss carefully assembled over a half-century between 1912 and 1963, amplified only slightly since his death, is a remarkably significant collection. In addition to their aesthetic quality and artistic significance, the objects hold much information regarding the social worlds and religious and symbolic views of the people who made and used them before the arrival of Europeans in the New World.

This volume is the second in a series of catalogues that will treat objects in the Bliss Pre-Columbian Collection. The majority of the Olmec objects in the collection are made of jade, the most precious material for the peoples of ancient Mesoamerica from early times through the sixteenth century. Various items such as masks, statuettes, jewelry, and replicas of weapons and tools were used for ceremonial purposes and served as offerings.

Karl Taube brings his expertise on the lifeways and beliefs of ancient Mesoamerican peoples to his study of the Olmec objects in teh Bliss collection. His understanding of jade covers a broad range of knowledge from chemical compositions to geological sources to craft technology to the symbolic power of the green stone. Throughout the book the author emphasizes the role of jade as a powerful symbol of water, fertility, and particularly, of the maize plant which was the fundamental source of life and sustenance for the Olmec. The shiny green of the stone was analogous to the green growth of maize. This fundamental concept was elaborated in specific religious beliefs, many of which were continued and elaborated by later Mesoamerican peoples, such as the Maya. Karl Taube employs his substantial knowledge of Pre-Columbian cultures to explore and explicate Olmec symbolism in this catalogue.

This volume, the third in a series of catalogues of Pre-Columbian art at Dumbarton Oaks, presents the outstanding collection of Aztec, Mixtec, Zapotec, Teotihuacan, and Classic Veracruz sculpture, jewelry, and painting. Four leading scholars present essays on the ancient art and archaeology of Mexico’s Central Highlands, Southwestern Highlands, and Gulf Lowlands as well as extensive catalogue entries of over one hundred objects of jade, shell, fine ceramics, wood, and other materials. The catalogue is richly illustrated with color plates, comparative illustrations, and diagrams presented as black-and-white figures. This catalogue will be an important and enduring reference for scholars and students, as well as an attractive volume for admirers of Pre-Columbian art.

Based on the comprehensive study of one of the most important collections of Maya art in the United States, Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks is a scholarly introduction to one of the great traditions of sculpture and painting in ancient America. Assembled by Robert Woods Bliss between 1935 and 1962, the collection is historically important, as it was one of the first to be established on the basis of aesthetic criteria. The catalogue, written by leading international scholars of Maya archaeology, art history, and writing, contains detailed analyses of specific works of art along with thematic essays situating these works within the broader context of Maya culture. Monumental panels, finely worked jade ornaments, exquisitely painted ceramic vessels, and other objects—most created in the first millennium CE—are presented in full color and analyzed in light of recent breakthroughs in understanding their creation, function, and deeper meaning in Maya ritual and history. Individual essays address the history of the Dumbarton Oaks collection; Maya culture, history, and myth; and Maya aesthetics. They also study specific materials (including jade, shell, and fine ceramics) and their meanings. Scholarly yet accessible, this volume provides a detailed introduction to Maya art and culture.